September, 2010

Nick writes about how he created the levels and lightmaps for his AppWeek game .

Ito has a Japanese equivalent of my post about AppWeek, which includes video of his awesome rail shooter.

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. We shipped Game Studio 4.0, so have no more need of checkin poetry . And we have conclusively solved the riddle of the animal names . It is now time to install our product and try using it ourselves. Yes, you heard...

A while ago I wrote about how to extend IntermediateSerializer to support lists of shared resources . That is great for reading and writing XML files (either directly or using other code that calls into IntermediateSerializer, for instance the built-in...

Automatic XNB serialization is convenient, but not always the fastest way to load large amounts of data. Its overhead is insignificant when your content files are small, or for the common situation of game content that has a limited amount of custom data...

This is an experiment to see which is smarter: phone a friend or ask the audience? The challenge: name an animal, the name of which consists of two words, each of which is themselves an animal, but neither of which refers to the animal itself. For instance...

Shipping software is a strange thing. First you work hard on something for a year or two. Then things get crazy as deadlines loom, the pressure mounts, and last minute bugfixes zoom around like a five year old on a sugar rush. And then one day you are...

A common dilemma when lighting game objects is how to balance the intensities of ambient vs. directional light. If you choose a low ambient level with bright directional light, you get dramatic, well defined lighting, but the overall result risks being...

Following on from my article about the tricksyness of random numbers , Charles Bloom has a great writeup about how to implement stateful random generators with weighted decay . For many gameplay tasks, this can give more of a "what you'd expect"...

(this article brought to you with help from Brandon , from whose emails I shamelessly plagiarized much of what follows) Some folks have been wondering why the Game Studio 4.0 CTP supported touch input on Windows 7 as well as Windows Phone, but our more...

My colleague Aaron Stebner has a nice summary of Game Studio 4.0 release dates and versions .

Red Badger has released a beta framework that provides UI controls for XNA applications. It is free for non commercial use, but no info yet about pricing for Windows Phone or Xbox Indie games.

My colleague Stephen Styrchak has been working on something rather cool... An Optimizing MSIL Rewriter (First Working Prototype) MSIL Inlining Update Now we just need him to finish this up and release it  :-)

I aim to fill this blog with original content as opposed to just aggregating links from other people, and Raymond Chen of all people is hardly in need of links from me, but in the unlikely event that anyone reading this has not seen them already, his...