XNAtutorial.com

Announcements

Dave Mitchell announced that the Dream.Build.Play competition is delayed until the beginning of February, teasing us a bit in the process.

Is Nintendo planning something to compete with XNA? On the other hand:

Bryan Livingston ported Jonathan Turner’s NES emulator to XNA, so you can play NES games on the Xbox. Not the greatest port, but a step in the right direction.

Jim ‘Machaira’ Perry added a forum to MachXGames.com. There’s not much activity there yet, but you’re free to post questions and answers. He also feeds all questions posted, in categories: XNAGSE, Framework, Announcements, and Recruitment.

Michael Morton has added a page with links to XNA components. Great resource you can add to!

Live in south England, maybe even close to Brighton? There’s now an XNA mailing list for that area.

Savage got XNA to work with Chrome, which is a Pascal dialect.

Google can now search for XNA code, even in Zip files.

The size of Xbox Live Arcade titles will be increased from 50 MB to 250 MB. With special Microsoft approval, some games will be as big as 450 MB. This must be in preparation for bigger hard drives.

Tutorials

Lawrence finished his 3D collision detection tutorials, and it ended up in three parts. Well worth checking out.

Daniel Crenna put up another video tutorial, about objects.

Justin ‘Kukyona’ O’Dell wrote a tutorial on how to animate in 2D. (source)

Darjo ‘ArYeS’ Vuk made some 3D models, including an XNA logo, a bazooka, and an MK23 pistol. He also made his second and third tutorials, about detecting mouse clicks and moving a sprite using acceleration and speed.

Zach ’sugrhigh’ Marcantel wrote a tutorial on how to control a camera With the thumbstick.

John Sedlak adds a glow to an image using some shader code, and tessellates a quad.

Workarounds

Cygon of Nuclex.org suggested (in theory) a way to use XNA on a computer without proper shader support. He has also updated the font renderer, so it’s now completely bug free.

Stephen Styrchak of Microsoft has an idea on how to share your game on the Xbox 360, without revealing your source code. A bit messy, but it works. Scroll down to his comment.

This MSDN thread eventually puts together a workaround to XNA’s limitation of only having absolute, not relative, mouse coordinates.

Roger Boesch reimplemented the GraphicsDevice, the GraphicsDeviceService and the IServiceProvider, so you can run XNA in a Windows Form.

Code

Michael Morton connected the Wiimote to XNA, played with Kevin Forbes‘ code, and ended up with this piece of code.

Dpoon of DhpWare.com made three demos with full source, regarding per-pixel lightning, normal mapping, and parallax normal mapping. Nice, clean code.

The DarkWynter Team released a game prototype with source code. If you find a solution to the little memory leak, let them know. (feed)

William Cairns put together a 2D game starter kit. (solution)

BrownBot released the .Fx file for his per-pixel-lighted brown robot. He also updated Eraser to have an online score board (no code).

JDPeckham wrote a snippet for a unified input system.

Alexander Jhin decided to start publish little tips and tricks in XNA. His first tip is on Vector2.Normalize().

Bill Reiss has been busy making XnaStage, an advanced menu system to plug into your game.

Phantom made a console component, similar to Quake’s. Source coming real soon now. (feed)

Rasheed ’Squee-D’ Abdul-Aziz released Animator 2D, which will take care of animation for you. He’s also working on a little shoot’em up, called Xanadu.

Riccardo Ceccato released Puzzle Diamonds, an addictive game with source.

Games

William ‘dczraptor’ Li of XnaMatrix.com made a little racing game called Puzzle, with a four-player split-screen mode. (stable) (latest) (feed)

Gendai made a new version of 1946.

Teasers

Thomas Mauer started on a shooter, and published some videos to tease us. The source code will likely be released when he is done. (feed)

Ely of ElyLucas.net put up a video of his ball-avoids-to-get-hit game. Just nod your head to the Swedish techno-rap. (c: (video) (feed)

Michael ‘Borillis’ Cummings started work on converting Axiom, the 3D engine, to XNA. The codename is Woodhall, and it has a forum.

Reads

Bryan Kirschner keeps blogging about the law, drawing analogies to open source. Worth a read, especially if you click around on the links as well.

This thread at MSDN tries to break down the anatomy of the start menu, and similar requirements for a game that goes on the Xbox Live Arcade. Especially Robin Debreuil’s Game Autopsies document made the read worth it for me.

Peter Dwyer gave us a heads-up on the limits of physical memory on the Xbox, and a simple but efficient way to keep track of your projects memory requirements.

Cheers!

Joran

Update: Oh,  I almost forgot, Tomek sent me wallpapers, in 1024 and 1280 formats. They are nice and clean, so they left room for my mess of icons. (c:

Mass Media

Bill Gates delivered the keynote speech at CES in Las Vegas, talking about the Xbox’s market position. Afterwards, Dean Takahashi interviewed Bill.

GameIndustry.biz summarized Bill’s keynote and interview, if you want the short versions.

Alistair Wallis wrote “An XNA Primer” for GameCareerGuide.com, and explained what XNA is, and interviewed Benjamin Nitschke, Alex Okafor, Julien Ellie, and Joe Nalewabau.

Russ Fustino and Joe Healy of Microsoft recorded a webcast Introduction to XNA Game Studio Express. You can still view it.

Sites and Feeds

Code-Geeks.com opened an XNA community site, similar to Xbox360homebrew.com in structure - you can sign up for a blog, ask questions in the forum, and subscribe to the newsfeed. They also have a sister-site, a wiki with an XNA section.

NewsXNA tries to be brief in its newsfeed, going for thumbnail pictures instead.

Daniel Crenna has a new game review up on XNAGameReviews.com, this one on Catalin Zima’s Butterfly. You do know you can write your own reviews there, right?

Tutorials

Michael Morton tut’s about Render Targets. That makes 45 tutorials on XNA and C#! All of those, an additional ten on general game programming concepts, ten on C++, some game reviews, and a small article about game art represent a very prolific man.

Riemer Grootjans converted his third set of tutorials to XNA, talking about HLSL. One of the best resources out there. I forgot to mention his forum, which is very active.

Lawrence of Sharky’s Air Legends wrote the first half of a Collision Detection Tutorial, and it’s a nice one as well.

Jim Perry has a BulletManager example, for creating multiple sprites from a single texture. (comment)

Glenn Wilson has also put together a summary of all XNA related links you can imagine. Some I haven’t been to, even.

Dean Johnson of the XNA Team kicked off blogging by talking about the math of rotating in 3D. It involves dot products, cross products, and orientation matrices. (feed)

Darjo Vuk kicked off his blog with a little tutorial on how to make a sprite look at the mouse cursor. (feed)

Mark Thomas of HotSeatGames.com wrote an input tutorial and a screenshot tutorial.

Code Releases

Mike of Manders vs Machine has released a full game, Microbe Patrol. It comes with source code, and implements several of his other code snippets, such as his Stroke-Based Font Renderer. The font renderer is a really nice little piece of code - 500 lines and no external resources needed.

Markus of Nuclex.Fonts has an alternative solution to rendering fonts. It comes with a tutorial.

Bill Reiss published XNAstage on the CodePlex, and provided a demo on his own site. So far, the project gives you text rendering and timeline support.

Game Releases

Blobbit Push is the first commercial XNA game released. For $14.95, you get fifty puzzles. There’s a Java demo version if you want to try before you buy.

Ben James of Kurodust Fighter released a first version of Sopwith XNA. (download)

David of Vector2games.com made iFactor, an XNA math game for the Xbox 360. I blogged it before, but now you can actually download it.

Alex Okafor released WildBoarders for the Xbox 360.

Flagyx released Ziz Puzzle, a Japanese “inverted Tetris” game, with Windows Source, Xbox source, and binary downloads.

Echs Bachs released Tank Buster TNG, with new graphics, for the Xbox. (download)

PerPixel released a fly-mode version of XNA Quake. (binary)

Blogs to Watch

Blackwolf started making a little card game, and blogs about his progress. He posts little code snippets along the way. (feed)

XNA Goggle will have tutorials in the future. Right now, there is a list of alternatives to XNA, if all the programming C# throws you off. (feed)

Justin “Kukyona” O’Dell of CodeAnxiety.com codes a Terrain Engine. It’s not released yet (except a really old version), but keep an eye on his site, because there will be tutorials as well. (feed)

Tom of Stressed Gamer is working on a 3D game. Lots of videos. (feed)

Taxman started blogging, and released an early attempt at a 2D game engine. (feed) (code)

Pitil started work on XNA Wargame, an RTS. Lots of videos. (feed)

Help Wanted

TheDuke is looking for team members in making a game in XNA.

MadMojo also needs a coder.

XNAtutorial.com Video Packs

As you may have noticed, I’ve released tutorials at half speed during December and January. It will go faster in February, I promise. Then, real life will go out the window with the Christmas tree. (c:

Cheers!

Joran

New Sites

Tijir (or Rijit?) :-) moved his link collection to XNAportal.com. It has a great interface, where you can Google normally, or with a bias towards XNA sites. You can add feeds you like too. I’ve got it as my default start page.

SyntaxBomb.com opened an XNA section on their forum.

Jim Perry set up MachXgames.com, which will be an XNA community page. Right now, it’s mostly the central page of the developers working with Jim Perry on a submission for DreamBuildPlay.

DSZraptor kicks off XNAmatrix.com with a racing game.

Code

Hr0nix released the RomantiqueX XNA engine, a real-time 3D engine. If you decide to test the demo, please provide feedback.

PerPixel put together a Quake clone. He also released the BSP code for the game. (screenshots)

Joel Ivory Johnson put together code for accessing the Xbox 360 controller from a Windows form.

Ivan Karpenko made a little Tank Wars XNA game. There are only screenshots yet, but he also put together a little Tetris XNA game, with source code.

Kenneth Baird made a 2D editor using XNA and a Windows form.

Jkat8 released a Shape Battles - a Gemoetry Wars clone. (source) He also has a mini-tutorial on how to rotate a sprite with the Thumbstick.

People discussed how to take screenshots on the Xbox for a while, and Shawn Hargreaves stepped up and put it all into practical Xbox scrennshot code.

Andy provided code for making a bounding box, given a polygon mesh.

Kiwidoggie is a new member of the Xbox360homebrew.com blogging community, Ha started with releasing the source for X-Wing Flight. (site) (feed)

Michael Morton wanted to know what tutorials or XNA articles you want next. Just click on “new topic”, unless you see what you want in the list.

So did Glenn Wilson.

Scott of 360gamedev.com released Fizzout, a boat racing game, with source. He also put together FizzVaders, an Invaders clone, with source.

Manders wrote code to draw thick lines, which display nicely on a TV. (code)

Gendai made a 1946 clone.

Not Code

Promit Roy at GameDev..net published an extensive list of free resources for game makers..

Stefan Virag made a few colorful balls, boxes and HUD graphics for you.

Bakker tried XNA, and Fighting Planes is his first creation.

Read or Listen

Shawn Hargreaves continued writing about sprites, this time about custom blend modes and point sprites on the Xbox.

Scott Guthrie installed Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. He also managed to install and uninstal on Vista.

Glenn Wilson installed XNA GSE on Vista as well.

George Clingerman added five things not in his interview. He received an MVP award, so congratulations to him! He deserved it, because he basically lived on the MSDN forums last year. Hope he keeps it up.

Tijir got tagged as well, and made a short five-things.

Phil Waymouth, Christina Storm, et al on the XNA Team, made a video about getting started with the Creators’ Club.

A good definition  of interfaces grew out of a discussion at MSDN. Mordt, who asked the initial question, will keeo a diare of his XNA life on his site, although it is not up yet.

I missed that Bill Reiss talked about XNA in Tampas, in November, and published his speaking notes.

Rusty Ranchero of XBLradio.com started releasing shows about XNA, and the first one guests four developers, including Jim Perry.

Tutorials

Bill Reiss kept pumping out great tutorials, and reaching 26 now, “Combining 2D and 3D”. It looks like a playable 3D game by now. Bill Reiss updated Dr. Popper for the final version, and source code as well. I missed earlier that he had a little test application, to see if you have good enough graphics hardware to run the game.

Michael Shuld produced tutorial number ten and eleven, talking about culling and octrees.

Daniel Crenna made another tutorial, this time about the Cartesian coordinate systems.

Updates

BrownBot updated Eraser for the final version of XNA.

Lawrence updated Sharky’s Air Legends with better sound.

Errolian updated Elves Revenge for final version. (source) (game)

Simon Jackson updated Hack-1, so it should work for you now.

Sneak Peeks

Eternity’s Child will be an Xbox Live Arcade one-player side-scroller game, made in XNA. Godfree published a few screenshots.

Oasis Games worked on a 3D game, and put out some videos. The graphics are placeholders from Halo, but the engine seems to be coming along nicely, especially the collision detection. (Video 1 and 2) (forum)

The A.R.G.U.S Complex: Last Alarm is a game for the Xbox, being made in XNA. Google translated the text, but the screenshots are not lost in translation.

Oaf of Cheeky Blobbit Dash looked for a new project. If you have an idea for a game, buzz him.

Cheers!

Joran

I’m now more or less caught up with the beta 1 videos. I have not covered some areas yet, such as bit fields. In the other hand, I have covered some new ground, such as Farseer Physics.

The total download of the previous series was roughly 90 megabyte. The new series is over a hundred.

I’d say if you viewed the original feuilleton, you can jump back on board right now.

XNA Tutorials Pack 9 - Farseer Physics and Singletons

XNA tutorials pack 9 starts with a quick review of the code execution pattern so far, on request from viewers. I hope it clears things up a bit.

Then it moves on to Farseer physics theory, mostly so you know what Farseer does internally. Maybe we will implement our own physics one day, and then this will help the understanding. I also quickly go over what the singleton pattern is.

It uses the singleton pattern to create global access to the only instance of Farseer we will have. It might not be the best way to use Farseer, but it does mean we learn how to use singletons. The implementation of the singleton pattern itself is solid.

It finishes up by creating a Sprite class, which links physics and graphics together. This Sprite class is similar to how the Mouse class linked mouse input to the graphics, essentially creating a mouse cursor.

At the end, a short video explains how to add comments which integrate with IntelliSense. The source code solution is therefore commented this time.

You don’t need to download Farseer yourself, unless you want the latest version. The solution includes a copy of Farseer.

I’ve updated the Download page as well.

Cheers!

Joran

An earthquake outside Taiwan severed several submarine Internet lines between Asia and America. Internet slowed to a crawl  for all international connections from Thailand. Speed will be restored in a month, so updates will be smaller than usual during this time.

We’re talking kilobits here - I am uploading a new video pack as I write this, and the completion estimate lies around 28 hours from now… Sigh.

No particular sort order today. I’m lazy. Maybe I’ll resort this tomorrow. Or maybe not. It’s past four-thirty in the morning, and I promised to wake the wife up at nine. I don’t think I’ll be able to do squat tomorrow…

Might as well play some Age of Empires III before she gets up.

Rambling again. Anyhow.

Games

Evan Kormos made a Tetris clone, and a code snippet for loading random content. (feed)

Game Tunnel finished their yearly top lists, rounding off with the top ten indie games of 2006. Some great inspirational sources there.

Adam Miles put together a small Scorched Tanks game, with source.

Debreuil Digital Works is a small Canadian company doing Flash games. They started playing with XNA. ‘Playing In Traffic’ is nice.

Benjamin Nitschke has two things for you. (feed)

First, he recoded Rocket Commander for XNA, which is just awesome, considering the video tutorials for Rocker Commander he put together earlier (non-XNA code in the videos, though). There are some thoughts about XNA collected at the bottom of the post as well, worth a read.

Performance

Second, he wrote a great article about some caveats when developing only for Windows, then converting to Xbox pretty late in the cycle.

Chris To, of the Microsoft .Net Team, played a bit with XNA, and published two articles about Xbox and XNA performance. They are labeled as part one and two. Seems as if Garbage Collection is less optimized on the Xbox. (feed)

Tools

Softimage released an X exporter for the XSI Mod Tool.

The XNAdev.ru guys (this time KleMiX I think) released an XNA Content Builder, so you can build content through the pipeline without using XNA Game Studio Express.

Digini (Christian Beaumont and others) announced work on XNA Magic. It will be a full 3D engine for XNA. You should register now for the February beta.

Reads

GameDev.net discussed a nice whish list for future versions of XNA. GameyLittleHacker adds his two cents.

Glenn Wilson published a second tutorial, Turning Your App into a Starter Kit, to go with his first, Your First Windows Game.

Michael Morton published tutorials on the XNA Storage Device and Rendering a Skybox in XNA.

Videos

Vector2Games works on iFactor. Nothing but a video so far.

GameTrailers.com has a second video up, with some new footage I haven’t seen.

Components

Jon Watte made a Lisp interpreter for XNA.

Leclerc released a tutorial set about creating skinned animations. The subjects include tokenizers, importers/processors, writers/readers, vertex formats, bone pose tables, skinned animation controllers, and a viewer.

His space seems to be private, so if you can’t access it, the project is at the CodePlex as well.

Bryan Edds started the Buttermilk Game Engine, with a long list of features, the most interesting might be to change from 2D to 3D objects in a side-scroller on the fly.

Andy Q started a Zarch- or Virus-style terrain engine.

Jeff Weber released a new version of Farseer Physics. It will be featured in the next video pack.

The Jaegers are working hard, expanding XNAresources with a Components Page. The first component is an XNA Text Input Component.

Links

The Jaegers are also working on a Community Arcade. It’s not up yet, but it will be fun!

David Weller published the list of all sites submitted to Microsoft’s XNA Community Page. Tijir, you have work to do! (c:

Joel Day makes music, and is looking for a game project to help out. He doesn’t have a site yet, but he has four sample songs (1 is best), and an email address.  He especially wants to compose context sensitive music with some basic interactivity, and he probably could pull it off, because he has programming and scripting experience despite being an artist… (1, 2, 3, 4) (joelday at-sign thirdcoil.com)

Question

The Morse code at the bottom of www.DreamBuildPlay.com reads Your World Your Game. Why? Is it just to be cool, or is it a hint? I’ve tried using it as a folder name and similar stuff, but no such luck.

Cheers!

Joran