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September 2006 - Posts

Colliding sprites in XNAExtras

Posted Sunday, September 24, 2006 8:00 AM by garykac
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 Read More...
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XNAExtras build 0923 release

Posted Saturday, September 23, 2006 11:50 PM by garykac
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 the Read More...
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Mixing Natural Language into Games

Posted Friday, September 22, 2006 10:01 PM by garykac
[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 being Read More...
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Separating your code and data

Posted Sunday, September 17, 2006 10:15 AM by garykac
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 Read More...
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Creating UI border elements in XNA

Posted Saturday, September 16, 2006 10:30 PM by garykac
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 Read More...
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XNAExtras build 0916 release

Posted Saturday, September 16, 2006 10:01 AM by garykac
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 (XSD) Read More...
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"But I don't want to have to worry about sprite depths..."

Posted Thursday, September 14, 2006 4:34 PM by garykac
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 second Read More...
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XNAExtras : tools and classes for XNA

Posted Sunday, September 10, 2006 10:40 PM by garykac
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 Read More...
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The cost of SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend and the SpriteSortOptions

Posted Sunday, September 10, 2006 11:11 AM by garykac
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 Read More...
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Don't mix ClearType with your game fonts

Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 11:11 PM by garykac
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 Read More...
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360 Controller Demo

Posted Friday, September 01, 2006 9:00 AM by garykac
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 Read More...
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