This blog is officially closed and will no longer be updated. New posts will be made to my new blog . Thank you for playing

I have been working with the legal in Microsoft to see if it is possible to convert XNAExtras into a Shared Source project (perhaps on Codeplex ). There is still a bit of work to do on this, but I'm hopeful that something can be worked out. Opening it...

My apologies for the lack of any real content on this site for the past month or so. I've been rather busy doing non-game related activities, many of which center around making preparations to start a new job outside of Microsoft. It's been a lot of fun...

Normally, my list of publications lives on http://research.microsoft.com/~garykac , but since that page may be disappearing soon, here is a list (as of 1 December 2006 - with links to papers when available). Publications G.Kacmarcik, M.Gamon...

This is a minor update: Beta2 update (ContentManager) Minor bug fix with TextBoxes not deleting their backgrounds. Initial stab at compiling for the 360 (by #ifdef'ing references to Texture2D.FromFile so that they can be removed easily) Temporarily...

I had a request to add an option to expand each glyph with padding pixels, and I'm finally getting around to doing it. To add n pixels of padding around each glyph, you can now use the glyph pad option: -gpad n . If you only want padding in the x or...

As you've probably surmised from the last post, I seem to be somewhat loose in my interpretation of "later this week". Attached is an updated version (finally!) of the BitmapFont.cs class along with its corresponding demonstration project. Note...

This is a heads-up that the current release of XNA Extras requires some changes before it will work with the newly released XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 . I'm hoping to find some time later this week (yes, I know it's already late in the week) and...

The latest release of XNAExtras added support for sprite collisions, and allows the collision detection to be either bounding box (bbox) or pixel based. This is settable per sprite - some sprites can use bboxes and others can use pixels. The sprites will...

Major addition for this version: collision detection has been added to XSpriteManager. Both bounding box and pixel based (mix-n-match sprites of different types). Also boundary collisions. These are demoed in the bouncy CollisionDemo example: From...

[I had intended to write up a small post about my project earlier, but didn't get the chance until now. Hopefully, you'll find it at least part of it interesting. -Gary] Being in the Natural Language Processing group here in Microsoft Research, and...

In the previous post , I talked about creating border art and using it in your game. One problem with the approach shown is that the description of the texture contents - the sprite locations and boundaries - is stored in the game code. This means that...

The XNAExtras.Border class provides a general border mechanism for UI elements. While currently only the XNAExtras.TextBox class makes use of it, future releases of XNAExtras will include Menus and perhaps some other elements that will be built on top...

This release includes a bunch of small enhancements and bug fixes. The only major class addition is XSpriteGroup, which allows you to manipulate a group of sprites as a single unit. From the release notes: (XML Schema) Added XML schema definition...

Well, you don't have to really. Or maybe you're already dealing with depth and you don't realize it. To recap: There are two ways of controlling sprite "depth". The first is to use the SpriteBatch.Draw methods that allow a layerDepth parameter. The...

In order to simplify releases, I'm collecting all of my XNA tools, classes and sample code into a single XNAExtras package. You can find a link to the latest version of XNAExtras here . This first XNAExtras release contains updated versions of BMFontGen...

The SpriteBatch.Begin method has a couple of parameters that control how the sprites are rendered on the screen. Most people are aware of SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend, but for transparency to work correctly, you need to ensure that your sprites are being...

The ClearType text rendering hint (option: -trh ct-grid ) tells BMFontGen to apply ClearType anti-aliasing when rendering the font into the bitmap. ClearType is a sub-pixel font rendering technique that takes advantage of the fact that each pixel on an...

Don't you hate it when you have a little demo that you're thinking of releasing and someone comes around and and does basically what you wanted to do, only better? How 'bout if it's a whole lot better? Well, Paul just did that to me with his 360 Controller...

As mentioned in a previous post , there is a clear need for a bitmap font generator that provides proper Unicode support. To address this need, I created BMFontGen.exe. This program can generate a bitmap font from any of the fonts currently installed...

Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Beta) is now available!

We're all familiar with the time-worn verse: Three Codepages for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Four Hundred and Seventy-Three for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne...

Michael (another PM on the XNA team) has followed Mitch 's lead and bypassed his blog to add a ginormous post directly to the XNA team's blog. His post: The XNA Framework Content Pipeline provides the best overview of the Content Pipeline...

or "Why don't Pokémon fart in the US?" If you have children of "Pokémon age", then you're probably aware of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) game coming up for the Nintendo DS & GBA. One clever aspect of this game is that you take a personality...

Mitch (PM on the XNA team) has been doing a bunch of writing lately it seems - not on his blog , but on the XNA team blog . His latest post: What is the XNA Framework gives a nice summary of the goals, layers and features of the XNA framework...