GameDevKicks.com - Stories tagged with XNA

XNA Society - Basic Event Handling

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:55:56 GMT

Event handling is a simple task to accomplish and can be extremely useful. It allows your coding to be more flexible because custom actions can be written and applied without the need of changing the game's base code.

XNA Society - Alpha Masking

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 09:10:01 GMT

Alpha masks add transparency to images and allow regular square images to become any shape imaginable. This tutorial is going to show you how to apply an alpha mask to an image.

XNA Society - Starting A Game Editor (WinForms)

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 10:52:04 GMT

Game editors are used to make creating a game much easier. This tutorial is going to show you how to start a game editor with a splash screen for use in your XNA game. Tutorial includes project files written in XNA 3.0 and VS2008.

XNA Society - Basic 2D Collision

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:37:56 GMT

This sample uses XNA 3.0 and shows how to do rectangle-rectangle, circle-rectangle, and circle-circle collisions with very simplistic and unrealistic physics.

How To Make A Better Community Game

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:36:31 GMT

Nick was sitting around playing all sorts of games in review and playtesting, as well as thinking of his own game, he figured he would gather his thoughts and write up a post on the things he thinks are important when making a game for Xbox LIVE Community Games. These are, of course, additions or elaborations on the things already present in the Best Practices guide and the Creating Great Community Games list.

XNA Society's Grand Opening!

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:03:54 GMT

Today, XNA Society is finally being launched! This site has been in development for somewhere around 3 months and I have been working extremely hard over the last couple of weeks to get it done. The purpose of this site is to have central place for developers to post articles, tutorials, and samples based upon the XNA framework in order to help other developers and aspiring gamers. Once you have registered for an account, you will be granted access to submit your very own content and rate others as well. Good luck and thanks for joining!

Using a Pool Memory Structure to Boost Performance

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:49:41 GMT

Matt Bettcher has a new article hosted on Ziggyware focusing on Using a Pool Memory Structure to Boost Performance in your XNA games. This technique is used to prevent excessive garbage collection that can bog your game down.

Procedural Music in XNA

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:22:10 GMT

A new article focused on creating Procedural Music in XNA. This article should give you a head start if you want to create your own music programatically or even create your own rhythm based game in XNA.

Initial impressions on the XNA 3.0 Platformer Starter Kit

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:31:31 GMT

Chris Williams has posted his initial impressions on the XNA 3.0 Platformer Starter Kit. It posts that it doesn't come with as much media than say one from GarageGames for their TorqueX product, but does has nice features, and has a great price tag, FREE!

Language Localization using Method Extensions

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:54:23 GMT

MrLeebo has a new article online focusing on Language Localization using Method Extensions in XNA. This article covers how you could implement multiple languages in your games using a simple framework designed to be extendable and robust.

XNA Series - Game Components

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:58:29 GMT

JohnyGizmo thought he would talk about a pretty cool class in XNA called GameComponent and its child Class DrawableGameComponent. These classes are made to add components to your game in a modular way. A component is something that needs to update with your game. DrawableGameComponent inherits GameComponent and adds functionality so that the component is also drawn at proper times as well. You could actually re-design our GameObject class as a DrawableGameComponent or at least inherit a class from DrawableGameComponent to give us the added functionality. Now from his reading, it seems that a lot of people think GameComponents are are really aimed at single game objects like a tank, but to add a TankManager class that would deal with the updating and drawing of all the tank objects in our game. But it certainly doesn't hurt to learn the type in an easy way.

XNA Series - A Simple Particle System

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:57:46 GMT

Sometimes you need to create a an effect like smoke or an explosion. This is when you can turn to a particle system. You can think of a particle system as an emitter. It emits points on given velocities, and each of those points has a lifetime. Once that lifetime is over they are no longer updated or drawn. This example by JohnnyGizmo will be a simple "fountain".

Easy Serialization of Network Packets

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:33:07 GMT

One of the tricks of network programming is simply sending all the data you need. Generally this involves one or more calls to a PacketWriter.Write method. For even a small packet you can wind up with three or four of these method calls everywhere you want to send a particular set of data. This quickly becomes time consuming and error prone. It's even more annoying when you decide to change the data being sent and then have to update all the code that sends this data.

Blur and Glow

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:29:45 GMT

Having trouble with your blurring and/or glowing? Well have John Sedlak got a sample for you! He has included a Xbox 360 version along with the standard Windows. The code is written for the XNA 3.0 Framework.

XNA Tutorial Series Updated to C# 3.0

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 14:37:29 GMT

Michael Shuld has updated his XNA tutorial series to XNA 3.0 and C# 3.0. His series of tutorials cover the basics of XNA, cameras, input, model rendering, effects, post processing and much more.

Biology Battle PC Pre-Release - XNA Game

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:46:08 GMT

Biology Battle has been released for the PC, and Ziggy from Ziggyware has the info. This game features awesome graphics and wicked shoot-em-up action. This game is coming this November, upon the release of the XNA Community Games, you will be able to get Biology Battle on Xbox LIVE.

Quick "Air Legends" update

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:37:18 GMT

With the Dream Build Play entry complete and the results due any day, Sharky thought he'd look at adding a couple more flyable Aircraft choices. After all, the XNA 3.0 & the Community Games marketplace is coming soon, so might as well be ready for that.

BadCorporateLogo: Cross-Platform Programming Revisited

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:20:32 GMT

Stephen Styrchak has posted about using XNA Game Studio 3.0 to build cross-platform games. Cross-platform programming in XNA Game Studio 3.0 is easier than ever. You can port your game to another platform in a single click, and the projects automatically keep themselves in sync when you add, delete, or rename files.

XNA Developers Community Network for Independent Developers

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:29:31 GMT

As Game Studio 3.0 is closer to release (October 30th), the new XBox360 Community Games gets closer to going live, er, LIVE! The article details a site in development that is geared towards giving small/indy groups their own "bridge" between their games and their players. Just as high end commercial games receive sites such as IGN, Gamespot, Gamespy etc... this is the smaller scale, "independent" level. Right now, there's an open call for all XNA Developers for "Community Games" , Windows and Zune products to get listed and step onto a [slightly] bigger stage.

A Closer Look at Profile Management

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:34:40 GMT

John Sedlak has posted an article about how he ran into the problem of managing users and their profiles in a way that was not going to limit what he could do within his game, Galactic Wars [3] 2.0. This article gives you a closer look at how he am handling users in the game.

The One About Storage

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:48:00 GMT

Mitch Walker has a great post about what he calls the "Storage API Hang of Fun". He goes on to explain why this phenomenon happens and how to fix it so it doesn't happen.

XNA Sun Shader Effect

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:31:44 GMT

Nicolas Menzel has written a nice article focusing on how to render an awesome Sun Shader Effect in XNA.

Building an Xml Serialization Provider

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:55:10 GMT

John Sedlak has posted a new article focusing on building an XML serialization provider in XNA. The technique he uses is reflection to create a robust and easy to use serialization class that can be re-used.

Hilva Graphics Engine

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:49:37 GMT

Hilva (formerly GraphiXNA) is a free (for non-commercial use) high performance realtime graphics library for Microsoft XNA designed to make games easier and more intuitive for developers to produce games and demos on Windows and XBox 360 utilizing full power of GPU.