Yes, I've been slacking off again, but for the past week I had an excuse (kinda). I was at the Microsoft MVP Summit learning about all the cool stuff that's coming and playing with my new Zune. :)

All kinds of silly (and not so silly) ideas were tossed around by the XNA MVPs and I threw together one of them - Endurance. It's a silly little game, but knowing the competitive nature of gamers, someone will keep it going for wayyyyy too long. :D

Our friend George was the originator of this one, so go blame him if you'd like.

Channel 10 has been giving XNA GS some love for a while now. Laura Foy made another post last night that you can check out here. Hit the XNA tag on the post for more good stuff.

The bad news would be for those 2 or 3 people that were following my RPG series and waiting for the next part. I'm afraid that series is going to be discontinued. :(  The good news is that I'm starting a much larger version of it. More info will follow soon. :)

I've been fiddling around with this RPG and associated book/text since my VB 6 days. It's great that it'll finally see the light of day.

Check out the latest issue (April 08) of the Official Xbox Magazine. On page 54 you'll notice that The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai game created with XNA Game Studio is included in the list of upcoming Xbox Live Arcade games. Very nice. Another known commercial  XNA GS game, Schizoid, is also included on that page. It looks like XNA Game Studio is set to take over the gaming industry, especially come the end of this year when we'll have the ability to publish XNA GS games to Live Arcade. :)

Or a thousand HP in this case:

OK, so this is a little old, but it's still freakin' cool! The movie is looking great so far. It might actually live up to us fanboy's expectations. :)

So you didn't get to attend this year's GDC (like me :( ) and you missed all the goodness of the GDC Expo. We'll Dave Mark has come to your rescue. Here's his "Expo in 10 minutes" post with accompanying video.

Gamasutra has posted a nice article detailing the steps for the up-coming XNA community game distribution model.

Unfortunately, I can't embed from MSN Video (at least I couldn't figure it out in the 2 minutes I spent trying), but you can check it out here.

I've posted this to a couple of places already, but this post is probably a good one to link to.

/me gets back to work on a game for the beta

edit: Gamasutra now has their review up

From this article, looks like MS revealed something before the keynote tomorrow. Pro developers that aren't doing cutting edge games shouldn't have many reasons left not to adopt XNA Game Studio now.

Five winners were announced yesterday. Congrats to all. I haven't had a chance to play any of the games, but I'm hoping to find some time. Now we just have to wait for the main competition to start. :)

According to this article, it's possible. Combine that with the title of the MS keynote at the Game Developers Conference and I think we'll see some interesting things in the near future from Microsoft. Stay tuned Wednesday when MS will reveal what's in store.

From this post in the Creators Club forums:

InteliShade is an add-in for Visual Studio 2005 non-Express SKUs (Add-ins are not allowed in Express) that enabled syntax highlighting in your HLSL (.fx) files. New features in Beta 1.2 also include auto-completion (hit Ctrl-Space to open intelisense) and tooltip styled documentation (hovering over texture tells you what kind of object it is). All known performance issues have been taken care of.

So try it out and suggest some ideas and opinions on how to improve it!

http://intelishade.net/files/folders/beta_releases/entry41.aspx

Seems there's no limit to the amount of stupid people in this world. It continually amazes me that people willingly do things that they don't need to do that are potentially fatal. You can read about the departed here.

Threw this code together in about 5 minutes in response to a question on gamedev.net and figured I'd throw it out here for anyone that's interested. I make no claims about it being the ideal way to do a Breakout level. :)

    public class Brick
    {
        private BoundingBox _box;
        private Vector2 _location;
        private bool _alive;

        public Brick(Vector2 location)
        {
            _location = location;
            _box = new BoundingBox(new Vector3(location.X, location.Y, 0), new Vector3(location.X * Level.BrickWidth, location.Y * Level.BrickHeight, 0));
            _alive = true;
        }

        public Vector2 Location
        {
            get { return _location; }
        }

        public bool Alive
        {
            get { return _alive; }
        }

        public BoundingBox Box
        {
            get { return _box; }
        }
            
        public void Kill()
        {
            _alive = false;
        }
    }

    public class Level
    {
        public const int BrickWidth = 32;
        public const int BrickHeight = 8;

        private List<Brick> _bricks;

        public Level(int rows, int cols)
        {
            _bricks = new List<Brick>();

            Brick brick;

            for (int x = 0; x<cols;x++)
            {
                for (int y = 0;y<rows;y++)
                {
                    brick = new Brick(new Vector2(x * BrickWidth, y * BrickHeight));
                    _bricks.Add(brick);
                }
            }
        }

        public void LevelUp(int rows, int cols)
        {
            _bricks.Clear();

            Brick brick;

            for (int x = 0; x < cols; x++)
            {
                for (int y = 0; y < rows; y++)
                {
                    brick = new Brick(new Vector2(x * BrickWidth, y * BrickHeight));
                    _bricks.Add(brick);
                }
            }
        }

        public bool CheckForCollision(BoundingBox ball)
        {
            BoundingBox brick;
            Vector2 location;
            bool ret = false;

            for (int i = 0; i < _bricks.Count; i++)
            {
                if (_bricks[i].Alive)
                {
                    ret = ball.Intersects(_bricks[i].Box);

                    if (ret)
                    {
                        _bricks[i].Kill();
                        break;
                    }
                }
            }

            return ret;
        }

        public void Render()
        {
            for (int i = 0; i < _bricks.Count; i++)
            {
                if (_bricks[i].Alive)
                {
                    //render
                }
            }

        }
    }

Yes, MS saw fit to renew my MVP Award for another year. I guess I did something worthwhile during the year to earn it. Since George will make me look bad with his list, I'll have to do one myself. :)

XBL Radio Podcast

I started the year off by participating in a podcast with the guys over at XBL Radio and a couple of developers talking about XNA and the possibility for gamers and game developers. You can download the podcast from here.

Tech Editing

I did the tech edits for two XNA books, Ben Nitschke's Pro XNA Game Programming book and the as-yet-unreleased Expert One-on-One XNA Game Programming book.

Forums

I continued helping out on a couple of forums - the Creators Club site forums, GameDev.net, and the Game Programming Wiki forums, although my posts on the CC forums lagged behind a couple of others. But hey, one of them is on the XNA team and another sits around the house for a living, supposedly doing software development (yes, I'm talking about the Z-Man ;) ). I'm guessing Nick just doesn't have a life (even more so than me) to have upped his post count so greatly.

Blog

Although I didn't make as many posts as I wanted on this blog, I think I did manage to get a couple out there that someone hopefully found useful. I'm determined to finish my serious on RPG game dev using XNA and get my RPG Starter Kit out there before MS releases theirs. :)

XNA Book

I guess the biggest thing I worked on was the book I'm co-authoring for Wordware. While not quite aimed at the same audience as Ben's, hopefully it'll help people out. The fact that it's been updated for XNA Game Studio 2.0 (which threw a big wrench in the works and has delayed it a bit) is a plus. I'd love opportunity to do another, maybe on RPG game development in XNA (maybe even an MMORPG!!! :D OK, so it wouldn't be an MMO, but it's cool to dream, right!?)

Maybe George and I will set a precedent for the other XNA MVPs and we'll get more of us talking about how great game development using XNA GS can be! ;)

Stumbled across these in one of my net wanderings. Nice to know I have a good chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. :) Click them and see how you match up.

 72% Geek

60%

Marc Whitten, the General Manager of Xbox LIVE says in an upcoming letter:

Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.

At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service. And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge. In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.

Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

Sincerely,

Marc Whitten
General Manager, Xbox LIVE

Gotta love free stuff. I wonder if we'll get to choose which game? Probably not, but it's still nice that they're doing this.