XNAtutorial.com

Here’s two new tutorials, 12 and 13. Both are roughly half-an-hour.

I shot them at work, which means I used a different microphone. It sucks, because it doesn’t have a filter. On the other hand, it is loud, so I’ll probably scare your pants off every time I breathe into the microphone… (c: But that’s life. I’ll look into buying a new microphone soon.

Tutorial 12 adds a tiny Mouse class, and talks about using statements and namespace aliases at the same time. No source is included.

Tutorial 13 talks about enumerations, bit fields, and flags, which make it possible to improve on the Mouse class. The source is included, and it also has namespace aliases to all classes, which is not in the video.

Hope I didn’t screw up too much because of all those damn phone calls…

It’s half past midnight, so no poll this time. Live with it! (c:

Did the video get stretched for you? I changed some settings, to make it easier to shoot for me, and it doesn’t get stretched for me when I play it. If lots of people report this as a problem, I’ll deal with it.

Cheers!

Joran

The eleventh tutorial adds a sprite sheet, and makes good use of it with an animation.

As for learning C#, not much new, except briefly mentioning the keyword “this”, and introducing “while” loops.

I’ve increased the speed a bit, because that’s what people seem to want. Let me know how that works for you.

I’ve also changed the design of the Read Along a bit. It is now syntax highlighted, and it should be possible to cut and paste code from it - it worked on my computer at least.

Sorry it took a while to birth this one. I’ve been busy looking into making a few changes to the site, including a forum. I haven’t found an IDE for PHP which even remotely compares to C# and XNA. Suckage!

UPDATE: The Source code is missing the animation part. Here’s the fixed version of the source.

Reshooting

Next project: Reshooting tutorials one through three, so they match the other ones in design and codec. Stupid little me lost the original unpacked versions…

Then packing up the tutorials in four-packs, in both WMV and SWF formats. I’m sorry, but the priority for this is increasing, as people are turned off by the XviD format, and I actually have people requesting SWF, because it works on their Macintoshes…

But that should be fairly smooth. I might, MIGHT, have it done in time to get tutorial 12 out this week. But I’m not promising anything. Gotta work too, you know…

Cheers!

Joran

The last update was a few days late, so this one is a few days early, to compensate. Ha!

Michael Klucher finally gave an estimate of XNA Game Studio Express beta 2. We’re talking about weeks away. That will be nice!

Bill Reiss is still producing, and has gone from eight to twelve tutorials for beginners since last update!

Michael Schuld is expanding his XNA tutorials, with two new ones. The first one replaces the sprite class (using the CPU) with shaders (using the GPU) and a basic camera. The second one adds camera movement and input.

As a reference, Michael started the series in September with two other tutorials. The first one setting his 3D engine up, and the second one about the scene graph and the object framework.

Jim Perry has posted the source for making a color pulse (using the CPU). In the comment section at the bottom of the above page, read the comment by Joel Martinez about making a color pulse with shaders too (using the GPU).

Oaf of cheeky.gr has posted a demo of his Java-to-XNA conversion of Blobbit Dash. No source, though.

Isaac Nicolay’s site goes up and down, at least from Thailand, but I managed to access his 2D tile engine. It is good, so check it out!

Diego Hernán Cánepa is working on converting Karvonite to XNA. Karvonite will be a free game data storage alternative, and is scaled somewhere between an XML file and an SQL server. As it is now, it integrates well with ADO.Net, but doesn’t support XNA yet. It will, however, integrate with XNA soon. The reason I mention it is because Diego wants feedback.

Cheers!

Joran

This weekly update is a bit late, or a bit early, depending on how you see it. (c:

Recommended Links for Beginners

Bill Reiss is pumping out XNA tutorials, and had eight at last count. They are for complete beginners, so if you like XNAtutorial, you will like what he is doing too.

Brian Leip released Missile Commander, with original graphics. (Game Zip) (Source Zip)

PJ Bennett, one of the xna360homebrew.com contestants, released a supposedly playable version of Bozotron: 2064. It didn’t run out-of-the-box for me, though, and I didn’t have time to tinker. (Game and Source Zip) (Screenshot)

Glenn Wilson has put together a keyboard component.

Machaira has released a Screenshot Component, so you won’t have to code in-game screenshot saving by yourself. (Component Zip)

PsyCadelik has made Psykoban, a beautiful Sokoban clone, which you can actually play. (Game and Source Zip) (Screenshot)

More Advanced Stuff

Mitch Walker talks about Game.GameServices, which are really cool. It will be a while before we get there with XNAtutorials, though.

Mark has put together a vector renderer class. (Source)

Jacob Repp has made a 3DS model loader. (Loader Source) (Wrapper Source)

Games without Source

Lawrence is working on porting his code to XNA, and has . He might not share his source, but he is asking if you want to know anything in particular, as he shares code snippets. (Game Zip) (Screenshot)

Toolkit Updates

Microsoft released the October version of DirectX SDK. For XNA, the main difference is that they have improved the XACT interface, but in general you can save yourself the download. David Weller says it’s does not officially support XNA, but it’s working fine for me.

If you really want to be cutting-edge, try out the beta of the Visual C# Service Pack. It might help with stability, but I’m waiting for the final release. If you go for it, make the final product better for me, by reporting problems. (c:

John harding release Sprite Strip composer, which stitches together several images into a collage. Mark Coffman has put together clear instructions. (Tool Zip)

XNA News

Frank Savage does an hour-long video about the Spacewar Starter Kit, outlining improvements coming up, and mentions that the two upcoming starter kits will be a racing game and an advanced versin of Pong. LearnXNA.com has a great summary of the video.

Boyd Multerer, product unit manager, and David Weller, were interviewed by Channel 9 about XNA, talking a bit about networking, among other things.

Joe Nalewabau of the XNA Team took time to explain why Visual C# Express was chosen over, say, Visual Basic. If you are dead set on using Visual Basic, you still can. Check out Alan Phipps for how to set it up.

Other Tidbits

Rob Loach had created OpenXNA.net, a new XNA community site. It has some tutorials and a wiki already, and possibly forums in the future.

ThreeSixBox.com is also a community site. They have some awesome demos, such as the balls demo by Derek Nedelman, and Earth Invaders by Smealum.

Gamasutra has a comprehensive (31 pages) article about platform games. It does a good job analysing the genre.

Curious about .Net 3.0? Well, Microsoft eLearning is offering a six-hour clinic about .Net 3.0. It will be free until the release of “.Net FX”, after which it will cost you ten bucks. It covers the Windows Presentation, Workflow, and Communication Foundations.

Andre Vrignaud has a writeup about asynchronous games. I love the casual approat to multiplayer you achieve with this method.

Internet Explorer 7.0 for Windows XP final version released today. Yay!

I’ve been coding and planning a bit. This is the preliminary outline:

• Tutorial 11 - Sprite Sheets (new Load method)
• Tutorial 12 - Animations (new class which Sprite inherits from)
• Tutorial 12 - Background (scrolls with a ball)
• Tutorial 13 - Mouse (detect mouse state and draw mouse cursor)
• Tutorial 14 - Gun (mouse button detection, dynamic object instantiation)
• Tutorial 15 - Fullscreen (cleanup LoadGraphics, reset graphics device)
• Tutorial 16 - Farseer Physics (replaces some previous code)
• Tutorial 17 - Floor and Character (static and dynamic bodies)
• Tutorial 18 - Keyboard (detection, physics forces)
• Tutorial 19 - Enemies (rudimentary AI)
• Tutorial 20 - XML (data storage, XMLDocument)
• Tutorial 21 - Sound (XACT, banks and cues)

Let me know if this outline sounds screwy.

I won’t follow this outline, for sure. (c: But something like it. I’ve already had time to code tutorials 11 through 15, and I will play with Farseer during the weekend. That will be fun!

The reason I actually have a plan (unusual, I know), is because the computer on which I shoot the tutorials is down for the count. There will definitely not be a new tutorial this week, although the code is already there.

I’m hopefully going to pick up a new computer during the weekend. I’ve cleared some of next week’s schedule, so I promise at least one next week, possibly two.

I’ve also spent time on researching forums for this site. It’s diffucult to find a balance between features and clutter. It seems that a custom solution might be the only way to get what I want, as some of the features I want only exist in huge forum software kits, which is overkill.

On top of this, FeedReader bugged out on me, my new Microsoft wireless keyboard didn’t work, the company I bought the keyboard from proved to be anal, and my wife decided to check out iPod (no, I haven’t installed Linux yet and buy a new mobile phone (I have to play with it too :-). But that’s just that old sucker called life, interfering with XNA.