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Weekly Update - Competition in February

Announcements

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:

ported 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.

added a forum to MachXGames. 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.

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

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

put up another video tutorial, about objects.

wrote a tutorial on how to animate in 2D. (source)

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.

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

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

Workarounds

Cygon of Nuclex 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.

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.

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

Code

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

Dpoon of DhpWare 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)

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

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.

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

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

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.

released Puzzle Diamonds, an addictive game with source.

Games

made a little racing game called Puzzle, with a four-player split-screen mode. (stable) (latest) (feed)

made a new version of 1946.

Teasers

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

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

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

Reads

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.

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!