This is a little late but we just stumbled across the Mercury Particle Engine project over at CodePlex... the project was developed by JimJams and is pretty impressive! It aims to be a powerful, efficient, and yet simple 2D particle system that can be integrated into your XNA with relative ease... below are some of the features:
Extremely fast, a basic emitter won't make a dent in your fps...
Definable random variation of particle speed.
Modular architecture, only add the modifiers you need to get the efect you want. Saves on processing time.
Includes a selection of handy modifiers that can be applied to Emitters, such as OpacityModifier, ColorModifier, GravityModifier, RandomColorModifier, ScaleModifier and more.
Extremely easy to create your own custom modifiers, simply choose which method to override and modify away!
Includes flexible emitter shapes including point, spray, circle, ring and spiral.
Extremely easy to create your own emitter shapes, simply override one method!
The guys over at the .NET Compact Framework Team have a pretty neat set of articles up about CPU Performance and Garbage Collections on the Xbox 360... its a good read... now that you can put managed code on the 360 isn't time we all started looking at optomizing performace of that code? Take a look at the set of articles:
Here are some screenshots of the XNA Launcher on the XBOX 360... This is right after a purchase of the XNA Creators Club on the 360... just in case any of you developers out there don't have a 360! (Kurt) :)
It's here! XNA Game Studio Express v1.0 is now available for download from the Microsoft web site. The XNA page hasn't been updated yet, but a download search on Microsoft turns up 1.0.
I'm installing it right now, and when I talk to Jason we'll be experimenting with transfering to the XBox 360.
Hopefully some of you may have noticed that there hasn't been much activity here in the past 2 weeks... well with Thanksgiving and about 4 family birthdays smashed around it things have been pretty crazy lately! We haven't left the scene though! We have some exciting things in the works here and are really looking forward to the actual release of XNA on the 11th! Many of you know that after BETA 2 hit most of the community sites needed to spend a good deal of time converting tutorials over to work with BETA 2... well... with the release right around the corner we didn't want to through out a bunch of stuff that we need to scramble and update right away.
Things should start picking up in the next few weeks... not just at XNAResources.com, but around the entire XNA community! These are exciting times!!!
I have uploaded my latest XNA/GSE tutorial, this time in response to a forum post asking how to determine what color pixel is under the mouse cursor. The intent was to determine what country the player's mouse was over on a strategy-type game map.
This tutorial explains how to use an off-screen color-coded map to make this process simple. The same technique can be used if you overlay a game interface onto your 2D/3D game by making a color-coded image of the interface to determine what controls the user is interacting with.
The folks over at The ZBuffer have posted a YouTube video of XNARacer with a Microsoft rep talking in the backround... XNA Racer is going to be a new starter kit available with the subscription to the Creators Club... the rep gives some pretty interesting details about the future of the club too... it sounds like they are planning on making a way to share your games with people outside of the Creators Club... take a look...
The folks over at XBOX360Homebrew have some new information posted about the upcoming release of the Torque X game engine from Garage Games... the should be a feature complete binary version available for download around the same time Microsoft releases XNA Game Studio Express (December 11th)! There will also be a Pro version with the source include for around $150.00...
GarageGames is also providing several copies of TorqueX Pro for the XBOX360Homebrew.com XNA Contest! Checkout the XBOX360Homebrew website for more details!
If you haven't already see it take a few minutes to checkout the XNA Video montage posted over at David Weller's site (www.letskilldave.com). The site has a really good run down of what is in the video and some interesting information about the XNA Racer game that is in the demo! Checkout the link here.
This is a little late but we just stumbled across the Mercury Particle Engine project over at CodePlex... the project was developed by JimJams and is pretty impressive! It aims to be a powerful, efficient, and yet simple 2D particle system that can be integrated into your XNA with relative ease... below are some of the features:
The guys over at the .NET Compact Framework Team have a pretty neat set of articles up about CPU Performance and Garbage Collections on the Xbox 360... its a good read... now that you can put managed code on the 360 isn't time we all started looking at optomizing performace of that code? Take a look at the set of articles:
Reimer has just finished updating his second series of 3D tutorials to the XNA final build code! Some of the concepts covered in his tuts:
Here are some screenshots of the XNA Launcher on the XBOX 360... This is right after a purchase of the XNA Creators Club on the 360... just in case any of you developers out there don't have a 360! (Kurt) :)
It's here! XNA Game Studio Express v1.0 is now available for 
Hopefully some of you may have noticed that there hasn't been much activity here in the past 2 weeks... well with Thanksgiving and about 4 family birthdays smashed around it things have been pretty crazy lately! We haven't left the scene though! We have some exciting things in the works here and are really looking forward to the actual release of XNA on the 11th! Many of you know that after BETA 2 hit most of the community sites needed to spend a good deal of time converting tutorials over to work with BETA 2... well... with the release right around the corner we didn't want to through out a bunch of stuff that we need to scramble and update right away.
I have uploaded my latest XNA/GSE tutorial, this time in response to a forum post asking how to determine what color pixel is under the mouse cursor. The intent was to determine what country the player's mouse was over on a strategy-type game map.
The folks over at The ZBuffer have posted a YouTube video of XNARacer with a Microsoft rep talking in the backround... XNA Racer is going to be a new starter kit available with the subscription to the Creators Club... the rep gives some pretty interesting details about the future of the club too... it sounds like they are planning on making a way to share your games with people outside of the Creators Club... 
The folks over at XBOX360Homebrew have some new information posted about the upcoming release of the Torque X game engine from Garage Games... the should be a feature complete binary version available for download around the same time Microsoft releases XNA Game Studio Express (December 11th)! There will also be a Pro version with the source include for around $150.00... 
If you haven't already see it take a few minutes to checkout the XNA Video montage posted over at David Weller's site (
