Weekly Update - Competition in February
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
on January 31st, 2007 at 6:14 am
The link for my forums is incorrect. It should be http://www.machxgames.com/forum/default.aspx. Thanks for the plug though.
on January 31st, 2007 at 10:30 am
The Nintendo Wii solution is similiar to XBLA on Xbox. The only known game for it is Butterfly Garden, which is also coming out for XBLA.
on January 31st, 2007 at 11:26 am
Wow, I live in Brighton, UK!
It’s like fate or something! Must check out that Wii-mote file too, I’ve been looking into getting mine working with my PC for a little while now.
on January 31st, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Thank you for the shoutout!
on January 31st, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Sorry about that, Jim. Should be fixed now.
You were the clearest speaker on the xblradio show, by the way.
Cheers!
Joran
on February 1st, 2007 at 2:48 am
Thx for the shoutout dude, love the site. Im in the UK 2
on February 2nd, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Joran, where’s the tut’s man?!?!
Probably all busy with LIFE. Haha just wanted to say thanks for being the jump off point for my XNA news keep up the good work! I would like to see this site grow. Get some ads on the home page and make a little bling.
Later!
on February 5th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Adrian, as in Adrian Woods of Mystery Case Files? If that’s you, then I have to say I’m a big fan! What are you doing here, you should be teaching me something! (c:
Tuts are coming. Yes, life got in between. As for the site, it’s getting an overhaul soonish as well. I’ll start putting in ads soon (not for me, but for charity), but I’ll try to keep the bling to a minimium. The site will grow with a forum, though.
Cheers!
Joran
on February 5th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Haha, no I’m learning along with everyone else, between writing mysteries of course. Anyway, keep up the good work Joran!
on February 9th, 2007 at 5:32 am
To the poster over.
Jöran uses his own free time to deliver great tutorials to the ones using his site. And since alot of other things must be prioritized before free time, it may take some time for new tutorials comes out. Also thinking of how much time it must go down in making content, material and videos for these tutorials, im impressed that he managed to get out one new tutorial every week.
He usually updates this webpage once a week aswell (atleast around there), so it is not a dead page.
He has also said that he will start releasing new tutorials during Febuary.
And even if Jöran would decide not to release any more tutorials, the content that is already available on this page would qualify to keep the domain.
And sorry for all the typos and the bad grammar!
on February 11th, 2007 at 6:31 am
some people are never happy are they?!
anyone can find a better site than this id like to see it
my favourite site on the net by far, keep up the good work joran
on February 13th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Joran,
I hope things are ok. I just wanted to post giving my support to this great site and I hope the the actions of a few idiots do not put you off continuing this great series of tutorials.
I am sure there are many other people, like myself, that have become interested in game development and XNA due to the excellent work you have done to date with you tutorials and this site
Regards
Mudry
on February 14th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Indeed Mudry,
I can’t belleve how some peoples can be…
P.S. At the moment like whole XNA Community stopped for a while, not just you.I hope that will change a bit, and that even I will update my site with the photoshop images I made way back earlier…
Kind Regards,
Stefan
on February 15th, 2007 at 4:21 am
Per Ivar: “To the poster over.”
pugmartin: “some people are never happy are they?!”
Mudry: “I hope the the actions of a few idiots do not put you off continuing this great series of tutorials.”
Stefan: “Indeed Mudry, I can’t belleve how some peoples can be… P.S. At the moment like whole XNA Community stopped for a while, not just you. I hope that will change a bit, and that even I will update my site with the photoshop images I made way back earlier… ;)”
Some of the comments above refer to posts that got deleted by mistake.
IP 204.60.154.75 had made five posts, two of them really childish, consistng mostly of dots. I klicked on the ‘This is spam’ button on those two.
The spam software then proceeded to remove the other three comments from that IP.
However, the only thing relevant I found in the cache was this:
Me: “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.”
Deleted Poster: “Wrong. Its in preparation for Castlevania. The larger HDD will be announced at E3 this year and will most likely be available in the fall. Not only do you not update your page. You also make stupid posts about shit you don’t know about. How about you make informed posts instead of just making shit up as you go?”
Let me apologize before I’m proven wrong, just in case I am proven wrong. Time will tell if the maximum size is increased. If it’s not, sorry.
Yes, I’m aware of Castlevania being big. I am also aware of Lumines Live being split into several pieces, and that was not received well.
I think that the mess that caused will be one of the reasons why the maximum size will be increased.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3156520
The only reason I can think of for Microsoft not to do this is that they leave the first-buyers (pioneers if you will) behind, as they can have max 64 MB memory sticks. I don’t think that argument is strong enough, though.
Besides from that, not much was lost to the ‘evil spam robot’. (c:
To my supporters:
No, idiots don’t deter me. They do waste my time (which could have been spent making tutorials) because I have to clean up.
But thank you all for supporting me! The incident did make me consider adding a sign-in system for commenting, but I’m not sure that would deter the little fucker. We’ll see if he comes back.
I guess the guy was pissed that I wasn’t providing free content he could smooch off for some class he couldn’t handle by himself. Maybe a teacher asked them to code something, and explain the code in class, and he was just ripping my tutorials off in want of a bigger brain. That’s the only reason for his behavior I can begin to presume. (c:
Cheers!
Joran
on February 27th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Deleted poster = idiot.
on April 18th, 2009 at 3:07 am
Hello nice site