Dream Build Play Winners, SOFTIMAGE|XSI Mod Tool, and August Content Update

Michael Klucher
Program Manager - XNA Community Game Platform

Whew! Gamefest 2007 has come and gone but beyond the announcement of XNA Game Studio 2.0 there was still a lot of news worth circling back on!

Dream Build Play Winners

Hopefully, you didn’t miss it, but the Dream-Build-Play winners have been announced on http://www.dreambuildplay.com. On behalf of the XNA Community Game Platform team, we’d like to congratulate everyone who entered the contest, and especially to congratulate those of you who won. If you didn't take the top prize, we encourage you to keep developing your game—there’s a great community waiting to try it and give you feedback. It's what our team is built on!

SOFTIMAGE|XSI Mod Tool Released

SOFTIMAGE has released a new version of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Mod Tool. This version of Mod Tool comes with a set of tools for creating content to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express.

XSI Mod Tool has videos, sample content and plugins to help get you started. Head over to the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Mod Tool site and pick up your copy today!


August XNA Creators Club Online Update

There's a new round of content available on http://creators.xna.com including a new starter kit available exclusively to XNA Creators Club Members

• Premium starter kit – Ship Game
  
  Ship Game is a 3D spaceship combat game set inside a complex tunnel system. Ship Game features advanced lighting and textures, a full GPU particle system, and advanced physics. Explore the tunnels on your own, or take on a friend head-to-head using split-screen mode.
  
  
• Optimization Tutorial
  
  This tutorial teaches you how to find and correct performance problems in your game, and highlights solutions to common performance problems on Xbox 360, using a particle system as an example.
  
  
• Distortion Sample
  
  Using a particle system as an example, this tutorial teaches you how to find and correct performance problems in your game, and highlights solutions to common performance problems on Xbox 360.
  
  
• Shader Series 4: Materials and Multiple Light Sources Sample
  
  Until now, the shader series has focused on single meshes, single lights, and single materials. This sample demonstrates how a developer might combine the techniques leading up to this sample into a usable system for composing a 3D scene.
  

We hope you enjoyed Gamefest this year, and that you’ve had a glimpse of some of the things we’re working on in the next year. Special thanks to those of you who were able to catch our webcast of the event, and thanks also to those of you hanging out on IRC to ask questions to the speakers.