The folks over at http://shmup.blogspot.com have been hard at work over the past 5 months on a game called Bullet Hell Tactics! They have just posted a video and some screenshots of the so far pretty impressive XNA built shoot-em up! Jump over to the site and take a look!
The folks over at www.tridexconsultants.co.uk have just finished converting a 3D level editor tool called Leveler 3D over to XNA! The tool is for VB.NET developers... the level editor for VB.NET should be uploaded this week for everyone to download and test out. Here is a link to a demo of the version of this app when it was made for Managed DirectX... take a look!
David Mitchell has just posted some more "information" about the Dream... Build... Play... contest over at the XNA Team Blog... If you want to get even more excited about this competition go checkout this post... there isn't that much more information in the post but he does indicate that the site for/about the contest should be launching within the new week!!!
XNAStage is an XNA GameLibrary focused on providing timeline based sprite rendering including extensible sprite and tween classes. Includes powerful 2D text libraries that support scaling, rotation and borders and can be treated like any other sprite. The main use for XNAStage will most probably be things like in game menus, dialogs, credit screens, splash intros, and level end scenes, etc..
There is a new article up over at Game Career Guide that goes over XNA and has some great interviews from members of the XNA Team as well as some of the big community developers out there... take a look...
The folks over at http://www.nuclex.org are close to finishing up their new Nuclex.Fonts Propert Text Rendering System. The font importer integrates with the XNA build process, so there are no external utilities involved. Just add an XML file with import instructions to your project for any font you want to have available in your XNA application and compile. A platform independent .xnb file will be generated (the exact same way it happens when you add a bitmap or effect to your project). The system is just completed yet but there is a workable version available for download... Check it out...
Dean Johnson, another member of the XNA Team has just launched his new blog! He starts things off with an article that goes over how to get an object to point at another object in 3D and the math involved in doing so... he covers 2 different methods: 1. Creating a matrix to turn your object towards the other... 2. Covers a way to figure out what direction your object needs to turn...
Mike over at Manders vs. Machine also has a cool new stroke-based text rendering solution over at his blog... this solution differs from the other text rendering solutions out there because it is resolution independent and shader based. The basic idea is to draw the font's glyphs with a series of strokes of a virtual pen... Mike outlines some of the pros and cons of using this type of solution:
Good things:
Nice and scalable!
Flexible: I can do my usual mischief with vertex shaders and pixel shaders to make text look interesting and "game-like."
Tight: You can probably tell by now that I like small programs that do a lot, so a complete font solution in 500 lines (and no external resources needed) makes me happy.
You can change the font boldness to whatever you like by changing the line thickness.
With a script font, it would be possible to draw text slowly and incrementally (as if by an invisible pen) for dramatic effect.
Bad things:
Drawing curvy glyphs with straight lines is pretty inefficient, especially with my rounded caps at both ends of every segment. I'm sure my code is much slower than just splatting down a textured quad per character, but for the kind of programs I'm doing, Windows and the Xbox 360 have so much graphics horsepower to spare that I'm not concerned about it, especially for the small amount of text I'll be drawing (e.g., "Game Over" or "Score: 56,000"). The demo app draws a lot of text, so it's a bit clunky.
If you zoom enough, the tessellation of curved characters is visible.
Most of my line effects look bad on the stroke text, due to the overlap between line segments. I'm planning to write some different pixel shaders that do effects based on the transformed position, rather than on each line's rho/theta -- that should avoid those issues.
Mike over at Manders vs. Machine has just released version 1.0 of his Microbe Patrol XNA game! The basic concept of the game is to create trails from one point on the arena's perimeter to another, without touching any microbes... the longer your trail is, the more points you earn.... Take a look!
Thanks to Mateusz Kierepka for the link to Visual3D.NET... Visual3D.NET is a shader-based 3D engine and rapid production toolset for visually authoring interactive virtual worlds using C# and VB with Microsoft .NET, XNA Framework, and Visual Studio.
Looks like it offer alot of the same functionality of XNAMagic... it is great to see these kinds of tools poping up for XNA! Take a look!
The folks over at 
The folks over at 
David Mitchell has just posted some more "information" about the Dream... Build... Play... contest over at the XNA Team Blog... If you want to get even more excited about this competition go checkout this post... there isn't that much more information in the post but he does indicate that the site for/about the contest should be launching within the new week!!! 
XNAStage is an XNA GameLibrary focused on providing timeline based sprite rendering including extensible sprite and tween classes. Includes powerful 2D text libraries that support scaling, rotation and borders and can be treated like any other sprite. The main use for XNAStage will most probably be things like in game menus, dialogs, credit screens, splash intros, and level end scenes, etc..
There is a new article up over at Game Career Guide that goes over XNA and has some great interviews from members of the XNA Team as well as some of the big community developers out there... 
The folks over at 
Dean Johnson, another member of the XNA Team has just launched his new blog! He starts things off with an article that goes over how to get an object to point at another object in 3D and the math involved in doing so... he covers 2 different methods: 1. Creating a matrix to turn your object towards the other... 2. Covers a way to figure out what direction your object needs to turn...
Mike over at Manders vs. Machine also has a cool new stroke-based text rendering solution over at his blog... this solution differs from the other text rendering solutions out there because it is resolution independent and shader based. The basic idea is to draw the font's glyphs with a series of strokes of a virtual pen... Mike outlines some of the pros and cons of using this type of solution:
Mike over at Manders vs. Machine has just released version 1.0 of his Microbe Patrol XNA game! The basic concept of the game is to create trails from one point on the arena's perimeter to another, without touching any microbes... the longer your trail is, the more points you earn.... 
Thanks to Mateusz Kierepka for the link to 
