Wot u do with .net : Xbox

1st XNA UK user group bar camp - registrations now open!

paulfo — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:51:52 GMT

The first ever XNA UK user group bar camp is taking place on the 21st March at iCentrum in Birmingham. Book your attendance here.

There are 12 slots that can be pre-booked if you want to show off your latest XNA game for peer review, your latest coding/effect technique or even want to seek input on an XNA coding challenge you are facing! Each session lasts 20mins max (inc. setup).

You can pre-book a session or suggest a session topic by emailing slotbooker@xna-uk.net

The days agenda looks like this:

09:30 Arrival and last chance to book a slot

10:00 Microsoft session on XNA and Community Games

11:00 Session time

15:00 LAN Party!!

18:00 Close

We will have the latest beta of Beatnik's Plain Sight to play during the lan party amongst some other games. This is also an excellent opportunity to use the iCentrum network for what they do best - testing! If you have an XNA multi-player game you'd like to test during the LAN party then please let us know by emailing slotbooker@xna-uk.net so we can work the details out.

If you are new to or an old hand at XNA development there will be lots to discuss, learn and play with. So book your place now!!!

New releases sneak out

paulfo — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:24:09 GMT

While I was travelling last week two new product releases 'snuk' out. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 and XNS Games Studio 3.0. Both now supporting the VS 2008 products which makes for a more comfortable environment on Vista.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) 2008 has some important changes to licensing as well as exciting feature additions. There are three "per-seat" licenses:

Express. Some feature limitations - 64 objects in the simulator, no simulator editor, no VPL compiler, no multi-node VPL and no support for Windows CE! There are no rights granted to distribute the runtime. This is a pretty big list of take backs which is disappointing - although the original Express did not grant runtime distribution either.
Professional. Everything is included, full function and a right to distribute the runtime as much as you like. Cost $499
Academic. As professional except free via the MSDN Academic Alliance scheme.

There is plenty of new stuff go look here for details

In addition to some of the core programming and tools features there are also some new cool simulations. Most of these are included in the Professional edition due to the Express editions 64 entity limit. The Apartment sim is included in Express and gives you a great place to start perfecting your new 'Roomba' navigation algorithm. The Urban simulation provides a 'DARPA Urban Challenge' like environment in which to perfect your autonomous ground vehicle.

All in, running the pro edition, I'm very happy with the new version. Lots of stuff to explore and understand. Lots of opportunities with my current robot projects including delivery of a full release of services for my Whitebox Robotics PC-Bot 914 - called A1-DW. This has been an on going effort challenged mainly by lack of free time.

Microsoft XNA Games Studio 3.0. I haven't got to do a lot of playing with this yet. But two key things stand out for me. Community Games - enabling us to publish our games via the Xbox infrastructure and receive a revenue share with Microsoft - 10million potential customers!! And the ability to program the Zune platform - ok for Europe this is pretty useless at the moment, but one can only hope Zune will make it across the Atlantic at some point and with new control versions that make it more appropriate for game play. I like the idea to build for Zune - I only have an original version and the controls aren't much cop for my normal game genre (action shooters), so one needs to be creative with the game design for Zune.

Download XNA Game Studio 3.0

Over the next month I plan to blog more on my MRDS projects and on XNA 3.0. I'm still new with XNA so plenty to get to explore and I intend to have a lot of fun doing so.

Xbox Live turns into 'entertainment hub' - USATODAY.com

paulfo — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:53:44 GMT

I'm lucky enough to be part of the beta group for this new look to Xbox 360. Take a look at the detail and screen shots in this report in USA Today to see what you going to get come 19th Nov. Its awesome :-)

Xbox Live turns into 'entertainment hub' - USATODAY.com