XNAtutorial.com

This will be the last update of 2006, so Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Source Code

Balance or Ball Race is a classic wooden game, converted to XNA. The download includes the game, a level editor, and the source code.

Clyde Coulter has started a quadtree project over at the CodePlex.

Manders has made a little emergent-behavior petri dish gizmo with a beautiful (but expensive) anti-aliasing algorithm.

BlueG has made a custom model class, which you can discuss.

LittleGuru has made a Mario clone. There are probably some legal issues here, so grab it before it is gone.

Aaron Leiby converted XNAextras to use the content pipeline. As the legal status of XNAextras has not been decided yet, you should download it as well. Actually, the whole thread is readworthy.

Catalin Zima has made XNA Butterfly’s source code available.

So has Alex done with WildBoarders, including the source.

Klemix of xnadev.ru has released the source of a Chunked LOD terrain implementation.

Arogan has released F14 XNA Game for XNA final version, getting a cleaned-up version (0.60) of the code out there as well.

RedShock has been playing with getting XNA on a Windows form.

Gareth Williams provides a screen transition snippet.

Tutorials

Matthew Randall, of MusicMogul, has started doing some entry-level tutorials as well. There are Your first XNA game, and Using embedded resources out already. There will be more at MyndTrip.net.

Andy Dunn has started a series of Tiny Tennis tutorials over at Coding4Fun.

Michael Schuld is up to nine tutorials for his XNA 3D engine. The latest one gets it running on the Xbox. The forums are healthy too.

Bill Reiss had time for number 23 - high score system - before taking a well deserved Christmas break.

George Clingerman has put together as small little fade method. Does anyone else get the creeps from Alice in Wonderland?

He’s also part of the super-secret xna3way.com, which has started publishing tutorials as well.

Riemer Grootjans has converted his second series to XNA final, making a 3D flight simulator. Links to the right on his page.

Alan Phipps is done with the 22 tutorials for Visual Basic plus XNA. Next, there will be 3D.

TiddlySpot is putting up great stuff as well. There’s one article about creating a Visual Studio project which will compile for both Windows and Xbox, and one on how to avoid some redundant texture processing. There’s also an old XNA beta 1 screenshot tut there. Not really news, but way back, there was also an article about catching the DirectX debug output.

Michael Morton talks about creating a custom content processor, and creating a game component.

Glenn Wilson is also starting a beginner’s series. Tutorial 01 is up, and is similar to ‘creating your first XNA game’.

Spindle is doing tutorials focused on Torque X at his TorqueXengine.com.

Videos

Who is that at the launch party? Why, it’s George again! And thanks for the eyeballs! (video) You really ought to read the discussion of Channel9’s video as well. Andy Dunn and Major Nelson pop up as well.

There are starting to pop up official videos over that MSDN, including three tutorials. (collection)

Xna5D GUI is shaping up, and now has a new dockable slide panel as well as the old button control and menu. (video)

Charles Cox does a quick 3D scene in less than five minutes. (video)

Michael Morton has started to collect links to XNA videos, similar to the two groups at YouTube.

This is not news, but when I learnt Blender, I used Greybeard’s videos as my first and only stop.

The UK launch of XNA also has video coverage. Do watch all the way, as Yuichi Ito’s flight simulator looks at least as good as XNA Racer.

Good Reads

Etayrien keeps putting out great articles about alpha-blending, now moving on to additive colors. He also has a great summary of the basic structure of a game engine.

Tim Anderson have, like me, talked before about how universities need to make computer science more fun. Well, with the current lack of applicants, they seem to take note of XNA. Good!

Dave Mitchell got interviewed by Gamasutra, and it’s a long one.

Peter Molyneux and Chris Satchell were also interviewed. Peter calls us bastards. Read the whole the DNA of XNA.

Manders has a good introduction to PIX.

Shawn Hargreaves keeps playing with the SpriteBatch.

Jeff Weber has improved the Farseer documentation.

Not really about XNA, but George Clingerman gave me a chuckle with his ‘The Villainy of Galrath‘.

Simon Jackson has a good roundup of the best XNA camera system so far.

XNAGameReviews.com reviews and discusses games made with XNA. WildBoarders is first out.

Updates

Visual Studio Express Service Pack 1 is out, and fixes a few bugs directly linked to XNA Express, so do install. It’s the 24.3 MB link in the middle of the five packs available.

DirectX is out in a December version. Nothing you need, but it’s always nice to be up to date.

Terragen 2 is out in a technology preview, also known as a beta.

Winners

Alex won the Xbox360homebrew.com contest, with WildBoarders. His game is fun, but I’d like to think he won for his interesting blog.

I’d say that the other prizes were well deserved as well, because effort was put into this by many talented contestants, and we learned much.

I hope the participants keep their blogs going, because I’ve had a lot of fun following their progress.

Some contestants have already collected their thoughts about their projects so far. It might be worth some of your time. MusicMogul, Strange Things, Hack-1, Turnip Drop, Small Ninja, WildBoarders, and XNA Butterfly have all written post mortems.

CodePlex Favorites

My favorites at the CodePlex right now are:

Animation, which helps me animate my heroine, Farseer, which makes my enemies fall down, Mercury Particle, which makes my grenades blow up, Parallax, which gives me a backdrop, and XNA5D, which gives me nice menus.

Arts Help?

Dafino and DaveKillJoy want to help you out with the art stuff.

Hoolak is more into music.

DirtyRat is a voice talent.

Last, have you ever wondered what is around the corner? Well, you can find out.

Cheers!

Joran

Two new tutorials. Updated the Download page as well.

XNA Video Pack 7 (Download)

Video 21 is more theoretical, dealing with Implicit and Explicit Casting, Increment and Decrement Operators, Assignment Operators, and While and For Loops.

Video 22 is practical, writing the system to extract a single sprite from a sprite sheet.

Video 23 is again theoretical, and goes through Generics, Type Parameters, and the .Net Generic List.

XNA Video Pack 8 (Download)

Video 24 uses a Generic List to store several frames of an animation, in an Animation class which inherits from the Image class.

Video 25 goes through some less-important vocabulary of .Net and C#, such as assemblies and the different parts of IntelliSense.

Beta 2 and Final Version

I’ve recompiled the code of each solution released, from Video number 1 and forward. They all compiled without a hitch, and run as expected

 I’m considering them as XNA 1.0 material unless I hear from anyone with a problem.

What happened to Video Pack 6?

Video Pack Five was so big I repacked it as two video packs - 5 and 6. I’m trying to keep each download at 10 megabyte, plus-minus a few, and it was over twenty megabyte.

Cheers!

Joran

Since the release of the final version, I haven’t found any severe changes from beta 2. So all tutorials for beta 2, mine included, will still stand. Phew, my bet at starting over with the launch of beta 2 instead of the final version paid off…

I have a pack of videos snugly sleeping on my laptop, which I left at work… I’m going to have to publish the pack tomorrow instead.

Xbox360Homebrew Contest

The contest has ended. You can vote, but you should download the entries first, and judge the blogs as well.

I’ve played all published games (as of this writing), but I’m holding off on my vote a bit longer.

If I had to choose right now. my vote goes to to Alex and Wildboarder. Not so much for the game, as for the educational posts he made. He gave suggestions of libraries to use, code snippets, and an entire tutorial as well. But I haven’t clicked yet… (c:

Catalin Zima with My Butterfly Game is a good runner-up, more for the ‘beautiful game’ reason, but good posts as well. Gambit_Sunob with Schism was also fun to read, as well as Darkside with Hack-1 and Crazy PJ with Bozotron.

TrayGames is watching the competition, looking for something to publish. They have contributed three prizes as well.

New Competition

DreamBuildPlay.com will host another XNA competition, starting in January. Microsoft themselves are behind it, so it ought to be interesting.

Official Site

There are a few updates to the official site, such as a modified FAQ, a list of Partners, and a page where future content for the Creators Club will be listed.

This last Creators Club page will be good. There will be so much more than a few premium starter kits, such as Benjamin’s XNA Racer. There will be thousands of assets - sounds, graphics, etc, which you can use in your games.

The redistributable is nice to have on hand as well.

Code Thoughts

Etayrien has some food for thought about transparencies and the SpriteBatch. Well worth the read.

Not news, but Glenn Wilson wrote a bit about the SpriteBatch as well, which I forgot to mention earlier.

Shawn Hargreaves keeps posting more thoughts than I can keep up with, including a nice fractal generator.

New Tutorials

Daniel Crenna’s second podcast is up, and the screencast to go along with it.

Robin Jubber thought an way to draw a font can be nice to have.

ProgrammersHeaven.com has a nice C# book in pdf format. Not new, but still nice to learn the concepts.

Mike has started another series for beginners, with two tutorials released already. He takes it from step one, like me, but promises to keep going until he is done.

Bill Reiss finally got collision detection up in Lesson 22. It’s a difficult topic, so the time to publish was long, but worth it.

Andy has released XNAInvaders, with full source in 3D. That is, the game is in 3D, not the source… (c:

Old Tutorials for Final Release

Riemer Grootjans is finished converting to his tutorials to the final version.

Glenn Wilson has converted his custom mouse pointer to the final version.

Code without Tutorials

John Sedlak, who is working on XNA5D on the CodePlex, just wants you to know that XNA5D will be a complete set of components and classes, including 2D engine, GUI, Physics, Animation, Tile Maps, etc.

Jeff Weber’s Farseer has also been updated for the final version. We’ll be using this very soon in the XNAtutorial.com videos.

I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but Gary Kacmarcik has left Microsoft, and started working for Google, and moved his blog. XNAextras is in limbo right now. Gary is talking with Microsoft Legal about putting XNAextras on the CodePlex, but you might want to download the last version, in case it all goes south.

Other News

PixelatedMayhem.com is playing with XNA as well. No tutorials, though.

Sharky’s Air Legends now support explosions.

The kW X-porter plug-in can now export .X files from 3ds Max 9, even though it says 8 in the title of their page.

F# is an experimental, future language of Microsoft’s, and it runs XNA fine, even on the Xbox. Jack Palevich has posted three articles so far. (1) (2) (3)

Benjamin Nitschke took a breather from his book, and did some ‘light’ conversion of Rocket Commander to XNA. Code is coming soon.

GarageGames Torque X has changed from closed to open beta. With starter kits. Fun!

Simon just mentioned an old page about physics for beginners. It’s not XNA, of course, but still explains things pretty good. Horrible design, though… Salvador Gatdula is the man behind it, if I’m not mistaken.

Cheers!

Joran

I’m going to download, test that my code runs with the final version, then publish a few packs.

Credit goes to Glenn, who was the fastest poster this time around - faster than Microsoft themselves…

But while I do this, I’ll put together the weekly update, so don’t expect the next video pack until wednesday.

I’m hoping to have three packs ready before my family starts dropping in for Chrismas, which they do on the 18th of December.

The third unreleased pack integrates Farseer Physics, so there’s lot of gournd to cover in a week. I’m pretty confident I’ll make it, though.

Oh, and there’s a link to the download page up in the right corner, temporarily.

Cheers!

Joran

Quick note:

The XNA Game Studio Express will be up on Monday, of course, but the documentation is already finished, and is available at MSDN, if you want to read up.

I’m holding off with video packs until monday - I want to see that the code runs on the final version before publishing.