VIDEOS FROM THE XNA EUROPEAN TOUR 2007

I've followed the links posted by Charles Cox to watch the videos from the XNA ET 2007.

So far, I've listened to Dave Mitchell presentation and some interesting topics cought my attention:

1. Although no dates were disclosed, Dave commented that there are some plans related to the "YouTube For Games" project that will be revealed soon (maybe changes in the monthly-fee policy?),
2. The RPG Starter Kit being currently developed,
3. The second edition of the D.B.P. compo will deliver similar prizes to this year's ones, and
4. Plus, the demo of the game targeted for children was kinda cue.

Does anybody know how the 4 winners of the publishing contract are doing with their projects? I'd love to see images or read comments on how their games are evolving in order to go gold.

Well, next video please.

Enjoy!

LOTS OF NICE PRESENTS THIS WEEK

Yestreday, David Weller announced two interesting things that Santa will deliver soon:

First, more details will be given about the upcoming warm-up challenge.

Second, and maybe the most interesting part of the announcememt -at least for me- and I quote: "... We will have lots of nice presents this week for all you good XNA developers ...".

So, have you been a good XNA developer this year?

MAPZONE EDITOR V2.6

With version 2.6 of ProFX comes along the respective version of MaPZone editor. For those of you who never heard about these two:

• MaPZone is an quite handy editor that builds procedural textures, and
• ProFX is a middleware solution that helps handling those procedural textures.

V2.6 of the editor isn't yet available for download but you can get it via 3DWorld magazine.

Now, what about ProFX? If you're using XNA you may have read this announcement: "ProFX to be part of Microsoft's XNA Tool Suite (2007, March 26)" and perhaps got excited. If so, hold your horses. No news, ETA, beta or even alpha whatsoever, just this thread.

Procedural texturing brings a lot of advantages over traditional texturing techniques. To mention a few:

• you save deployment space, and depending on how and when you generate the final textures, disk space,
• like in procedural shaders, the textures are generated at any given resolution, and
• 4D textures (real-time recomputing of textures).

Thus, let's hope the guys from Allegorithmic and the XNA Team meet this week in Seattle to make the above-mentioned announcement become a soon reality.

Fingers crossed!