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Weekly Update - SpaceWar Competition

with company are still working on getting the Dream.Build.Play competition site up and running, so they have announced a warm-up competition to keep people busy.

Code and Tutorials

with friends made Lucia, a 3D engine. “Kildekoden” means “the source code,” the pictures are clickable for full resolution, and the links at the bottom are for videos. (source)

made a jittered maze, and then worked on collision detection for it.

wrote a 3D camera class for a first person shooter-style game.

Archor Games released a 3D flight simulator, with Xbox source.

released a tutorial package which makes a small XNA Invaders game. Worth it for the shader part alone.

tweaked Shawn Hargreaves screenshot component, so now it works for Windows. Also, he updated Sharky’s Air Legends, so if it used to crash on you, try again.

released a cut scene camera library, a benchmark utility, and had time to work on his Helicopter Defense League.

made JonPong, a Pong clone.

renders video in XNA, he’s also getting into audio programming. Rene’s article inspired Joel to write, and are worth a read as well.

added articles about Triangle Intersection and Plane Functions with plenty of useful code snippets.

improved the XNES Emulator.

released Nut Harvest, with source, as always. Is it just me, or is that a really bad name, though? (c: The game is for Xbox, but if you have several controllers for Windows laying around, swap out the Farseer-for-Xbox for the Windows version, and you should be pretty ready to go.

Förbannade jävla skit! Sorry, I just spilled coffee on my keyboard… I’ll be right back.

released tutorial 12 of his XNA 3D Engine, advanced camera features.

of DhpoWare released a first person camera demo. Scroll down to the bottom for the lost of all XNA demos.

Grozzler released a reimplementation of the SpriteBatch, SpriteCache, which can do four-corner lightning of 2D sprites.

released Kart Racer 07 at the CodePlex.

Not really news, but ThreeSixBox.com changed name to GameProjects , and now has an XNA tag instead, where you can find lots of goodies I haven’t mentioned above. The reason for the change is to include non-XNA projects.

Articles and News

made a video tutorial on GUI creation, showing how to make graphics in Photoshop. He also wrote about interfaces.

of Microsoft described how to release a game for Xbox, without revealing your source code. Yes, it’s an old discussion, but it keeps being added to.

described how to get DirectX into debug mode. He also summed up discussions about rendertargets, as they don’t work the same way in XNA as in DirectX. He also talked about XACT pit falls.

released a content processor to get rid of the write-only ‘feature’ of vertex buffers.

got XNA to run on Vista.

put out a nice series of articles about learning C.

GameyLittleHacker wrote an article about Data Driven Game Architecture, followed by a post with a real example.

XnaMatrix released a Requirements Checker - a small program to analyze a system’s compatibility with XNA.

wrote about Managed code in Games in the latest issue of Game Developer magazine. The article starts on page 38.

talked about XNA at Black Marble, and posted the presentation and program.

teased us with videos of his Bullet Hell Tactics, a beautiful shoot’em up.

of Playstation talked, and said that their Linux bet was their response to XNA.

DirectX was released in a February edition, both as an SDK, and as a Redistributable. There’s really nothing important for the XNA community involved, but it’s nice to be updated. PIX got some more love, and there is an article about the new security features, and how to make them play nicely with an MMOG., though.

updated Snippet Compiler, a program for compiling code snippets for use with .Net.

released an updated, free CTP version of Karvonite, the persistent framework I’ve mentioned before.

New Guys

Astror will make Goldrunner, a Loderunner clone. He released a first tutorial as well, setting up a camera and a model. (feed)

kicks off his blog by compressing XNB files. (feed)

started with a billboard code snippet, like the enemies in Doom 1, or volume rendering using slicing planes. He gives a video example of a cloud. (feed)

will make a 3D engine. Not much there yet, but I might as well add his feed. (feed)

focuses on the academics, and you have to be an instructor to access the web site. If you are, you will get a web site with games, code snippets, and teaching materials, for using XNA in the classroom. (feed)

Cheers!