ZIGGYWARE'S XNA ARTICLE CONTEST

The Spring '09 edition of XNA article contest at Ziggyware is here!

This year, among the usual prizes for the top-three articles, our friend Ziggy -thanks to the sponsors of the contest- is giving away licenses of the recently released Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine -from Synapse Gaming, a technology tailored for XNA Game Studio.

The contest has already started and the deadline is May 1st, 2009. So go ahead, start your engines, be creative and submit your articles!

Don't forget to read the rules of the contest.

Let's write on!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

XNA GS 3.1 IS COMING NEXT

The cat is out of the bag, finally!

A new version of XNA Game Studio (3.1) has been announced -along with other relevant info like the next DBP compo- during this year's GDC.

No date has been published yet for its release, but in the meantime you can read the first quick notes about the new features that will be included in 3.1.

I guess in the next few days/weeks we'll see more official words with details on each topic.

In this sense, Shawn has recently blogged about one of these features: automatic serialization of content binaries (XNB). So, check it out!

See ya!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

IE8 & ADOBE FLASH PLAYER FIX

[ If you deem this article as helpful, please consider downloading my game "Just Survive XP" on the Appstore (free for a limited time):

=> http://itunes.apple.com/app/just-survive-xp/id461876025 ]

Yesterday, I wanted to watch a video on Youtube when suddenly, to my surprise, I just found the following message, instead:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

Since Javascript was enabled, in order to check whether this was a problem of Youtube's site only, I browse to other sites that I know use flash tech to find that I was really unable to watch any Flash content. They all prompted me to download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

So I visited Adobe's site and tried to get the latest Flash Player online. The key thing is that after installing the add-on, the movie clip that always appear on the site saying that your installation was successful didn't appear at all. Strangely, by refreshing the page -by hitting the F5 key- it did appear. Weird.

So I said, maybe this was just a minor glitch, and opened the video page on Youtube. Unluckily, that nasty message appeared again.

This time, I opened the "Tools" menu of IE8, and selected the "Manage Add-Ons" section. There, I found that the "Shockwave Flash Object" add-on was in fact installed and the version was correct, so I tried to "reset" it by disabling the component, closing the browser, re-open it and finally enable the add-on. No luck!

One final desperate move: just in case, I just opened the following menu on my browser:

"Tools -> Internet Options -> General -> Delete"

and deleted everything. Then, I downloaded the offline installer of Adobe Flash Player from the following link:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/ts/documents/tn_19166/Install_Flash_Player_10_ActiveX.zip

And finally, I closed the browser and executed the installer (btw, since the offline installer does the task of uninstalling any previous version of the add-on, I skipped that part and let it do it for me).

When the process ended, I just reopened IE8, visited Youtube again to find this time that everything simply worked just fine!

I don't know if this workaround will work for you, but if you happen to experience a similar situation then just give it a try.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you find this post useful.

Stay tuned,
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.