XNAtutorial.com

First off, thank you all for great feedback on the interview! I kept seeing the same names over and over, and I wanted a face to go with the name. I guess others wanted that too.

It’s been a while, because I’m having too much fun in real life, but here’s another weekly (hrm) update:

“New” Contest

3Dbuzz.com has a programming contest, which accepts XNA games with a Christmas theme. It’s a very open competition, so teams are allowed, as long as the artwork is by you. The closing date is 20th December 2006. Old news, but I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere.

New Members

Well, new for me at least…

Luc Raymond is working on a little game, and has a little video of a nice shield system for a shoot’em up.  (feed)

Riemer Grootjans has started a two new series of XNA tutorials. There is the 3D Terrain series, and a Flightsim series. Considering his previous tutorials with C# and DirectX, they are worth checking out. I haven’t had time to do so yet, but will go through them this weekend. (no feed?)

Micah Nasarow of ShakaWare.com has a very nicely done Menu demo, , which goes beyond just a simple menu, well worth checking out. Click on XNA in the menu. (no feed?)

Seraphino of Mechnet is moonlighting on a project of his own. He’s quiet so far what it will be, but it might be worth checking back later on. (feed)

Jacob Repp is putting together a small XNA RPG project. Not much there yet, but watch his space. (feed)

Mike Anders(?) has been busy playing with lots of interesting things, such as video safe areas, render-to-texture code, fractals, and debugging enhancements. Well worth a visit. (feed)

Errolian has released a game as part of the Christmas themed competition above. The source is available for Elves Revenge game. (feed)

Moved Members

Gary Kacmarcik, with the BitmapFont component, is not new, but he is switching jobs from Microsoft to Google, so he has moved his blog here. (feed)

Bill Reiss, with his excellent tutorials, now at lesson 21, is moving to Live Spaces. (feed)

Stefan Virag keeps working on his book, Learning XNA, but has moved to his own domain - xnaworld.tk. (feed)

Old Members

Daniel Crenna is up and running with his MoreThanICanChew.com. The name is an homage to the spirit of hobbyists, wanting to make the next big MMO game all by themselves… He has ported his camera demo to beta 2 and republished it. His old Model Movement demo is up too, but not yet converted to beta 2. He also has an inspiring manifesto, worthy of two minutes of reading, and two weeks of soul searching.  (feed) (private feed)

George Clingerman is just another guy who is better than me. (c: He wrote down a little trick for cycling through an enumeration. I’ll steal that right off and put it in a future video… (c: (feed)

Catalin Zima in the xbox360homebrew.com competition has released a screenshot of his butterfly game, and of the main menu. I have to say that his game is my favorite if I only count the beauty of the concept. (feed)

BrownBot has finished his Erase, because he won’t have Internet where he’s going. (feed) (thread)

Joel Martinez released the XNA Control a long time ago, but the source is now released, and updated to beta 2. It is a control you can drop on a Windows form, and it will set up the XNA Graphics Device, so you can render to a Windows window, integrating with buttons, drop-down boxes, and so on. It is meant for developing tool, such as level editors. (feed)

Derek Nedelman, who runs threesixbox.com, released part three of Simple Program, which uses vertex buffers, index buffers, effect files, creates textures in-memory and a simple generic mesh class. (feed)

Michael Schuld is adding Tutorial 7 to his XNA 3D Engine, where he reimplements the BasicEffect system of XNA to extend the functionality until it is compatible across both the Windows and Xbox platforms. Tutorial 8, about post processing, is written by Chr0nix instead of Michael, but is just as good. (feed)

“Official”

Gregory Wurm asked where the party will be on the 11th of December. Here. It’s Microsoft’s XNA Team’s party, and you’re invited! (feed)

Is this Official? (c:

Channel9 has finished their two-part XNA video series, which I’ve mentioned earlier. In the first part, Boyd Multerer talked about XNA. Now, in the second one, Frank Savage shows us XNA. Rory is working on more XNA interviews.

Cheers!

Joran