Are you interested in SharePoint? Maybe you are a developer doing work on a SharePoint site and are looking to get away from that SharePoint look and feel. Head on over to my blog to check out the SharePoint theming series I have been writing.
Looks like Gato Muy Splato should be ready for some public play by the end of the week.
Terrain rendering will be back in Thrust (FGF) for the next release. I am working on getting it to production status and add in lighting, quad tree support and more.
In this fourth [page, second post] installment of the MGS: Pong article series, I am going to cover how to draw a background for the game. Before I start, I should tell you that there will be two more articles: one for creating the menu system and one for pulling all the classes together. Okay, let’s begin! The background class (Background.cs) is incredibly easy to create. First we need some private members to draw the background.
In part one of the mini game article series, I am going to show you how to create a very simple Pong game from scratch. The tools you will need include Photoshop (or any other painting program such as Paint.NET or even MSPaint), Visual C# 2005 Express, and of course the Xna framework.
First we need to create our project, to give us a home base for all of our work. Go ahead and fire up C# Express and create an empty windows project. I am going to call mine MGSPong for lack of any imagination or any better title. Once the project has been created, add a folder called “Content” and then another underneath that called “Textures.” This is where we will store out art, no matter how bad it may be!
Been working on a new game…
Nick Gravelyn & Co are looking for donations to help pay for a trip to GameFest. For the uninitiated, GameFest is the once a year conference that often provides the community with some great new information about and in depth classes for XNA. So donate a dollar or two and help him out!
Hardware Instancing is an interesting topic that has quite a few uses. The idea of instancing is to use the hardware to generate transformed vertices to reduce draw call overhead. Now I know that sounded like a bunch of senseless technical jargon, and it was. In plain English, sometimes it is faster to let the GPU do all the work for us so the CPU can go off and do other work; and this is what Hardware Instancing does. This article covers how to setup a simple program that uses instancing to render a few rotating squares. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I am releasing the very first full version of Galactic Wars 3 v1.2 for the Zune. This version contains several bug fixes and more functionality. Most importantly, it is the first version to include high scores tracking with name input. It is also the first version to allow you to switch control schemes between the touch pad and the DPad though for simplicity’s sake all UI is controlled by the DPad regardless. I have also moved the content loading upfront so starting a new game takes much less time. Last but not least, this version supports the Andromeda (Hard) gameplay mode which gives you more points for a kill but is much harder.
As always, comments, critiques and suggestions are always welcomed!
Galactic Wars 3 (11486) - 2.58 MB
Now that you have created you First Game, it is time to actually start drawing something. Right? How do you expect to make a real game without drawing anything? This tutorial shows you how to use the SpriteBatch object to efficiently draw 2D items on the screen. In the end you will be experienced with rotations, scaling, sprites and sprite sheets. So let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »
