Entries tagged with xna - Channel 8

ImagineCup 2008 - Game Development - Team SiSS

SilkeChristina — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:22:00 GMT

Team SiSS war in der Kategorie "Game Development" auf dem Finale des Imagine Cups in Paris. In diesem Video stellen sie sich und ihr Spiel vor und geben einen kurzen Einblick in: "Was ist XNA?".
Schaut Euch an was Frank Götz, Ingo Köster und Florian Leckebusch zu sagen haben.

XNA creating virtual worlds

Clint — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Ever wanted to create an augmented world? Have you ever had a chance to play with virtual items in real life?

Professor Steve Feiner and one of his PhD students, Ohan Oda of Columbia University have created a way to mesh real life and a virtual world together with Goblin XNA. I had the opportunity to see a demo of an early version of Goblin back in February and was amazed with the ping pong demo. It uses a web cam and overlays a virtual items into the environment!

A version for public consumption will be released in the 3^rd quarter of 2008.

Keep a look out at their website.

Inspiration Tour UK - Wrap Up

edunhill — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:25:00 GMT

For those of you who are regulars on Channel 8 you'll remember a bunch of videos we posted for the UK Inspiration Tour back in January:

In the end myself and Ben Coley travelled over 15,000 miles to speak 4000 students from nearly 60 different universities!

Now that the tours finished we wanted to put together a video to give you a flavour of what it was all about...

Zune Game - N.A.M.E

cykho — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:14:00 GMT

Now that Legendary Studios has completed N.A.M.E - their first xna 3.0 game for the Zune - Paul's guest blogger series on How to Make a Zune Game have come to an end. You can download the free zune game: http://codeplex.com/Name/ To modify it simply download XNA Game Studio Express 3.0 CTP and have at it! Its truly amazing how far this has come since the announcement of XNA 3.0 at GDC 08. Overall, we've gotten some GREAT feedback from the community. Also, we got a ton of requests for a trailer and a demonstration of how to download a game to a Zune have come in. So, we made them!

For those of you who can't wait to play a game on your Zune get the free download and get started with this video!

Here comes the new XNA!! Bring the party to your Zune

UrJiT — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:48:00 GMT

So finally Microsoft has brought the gamer party to zune..

While still on the frying pan, the CTP for XNA 3.0 has created quite a lot of stir. Especially for the Zune lovers and developers who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2008, its Happy hours again. This link will take you to the homepage of XNA 3.0 CTP, but its not useful for development for the Xbox. For that you will have to work with the final release of XNA 2.0. Talking of which, XNA 2.0 does not support the project format of its 1.0 ancestor, but the XNA team has the "Upgrade wizard" available. Personally, I did not quite like the change in the project architecture from 1.0 to 2.0, not for any technicality but because the upgrade wizard doesn't upgrade solutions having more than one projects. When I was working with the first version of XNA, I hit a bottle neck when I wanted to print text on screen in a easy manner but there was no support. But the 1.0 Refresh gracefully handled the issue. But at the same time, keeping up with the updates is tiring :(
In India, there are not many students into Game Development and thats where XNA comes in. All in all, zune lovers are in for a ride, with great games, perfect for the long boring bus queues, recharge your batteries every day !!

Microsoft XNA Game Studio 2.0で何ができる？[DreamSpark提供ソフトウェア入門]

anmari — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:56:00 GMT

"How to" videos of software provided by DreamSpark. This video is an introductory video to XNA Game Studio 2.0

こちらのビデオではオリジナルのゲームを開発するために必要なもの、そしてGame Studio 2.0 で開発された学生の作品を公開しています。

Getting a job in the Video Game Industry - XNA Team

Clint — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Frank Savage from Microsoft Gaming Studios chatted with myself (Clint Rutkas) and Dan Waters regarding students developing with Hardware, games he worked on such as Wing Commander, Shaders, and as always, how to get a job (in gaming).

On top of Frank Savage, I have additional interviews with individuals from Blizzard, EA, Midway, and Linden Labs (makers of Second Life) that I'll be posting in the future.

Jogos em XNA na rede Live? Brasileiros!!!

Guerra — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:43:00 GMT

Pessoal,

O amigo Galileu Vieira do Channel 10 (nosso co-irmão) postou sobre os jogos brazucas que foram disponibilizados no XBOX Live!
Vejam os vídeos aqui:
Vídeo: Conheça os brasileiros que publicaram um jogo no Xbox Live
Vídeo: TriLiena da Tendi
Jogos XNA da comunidade disponíveis no Xbox Live - Brasil emplaca um deles!

É uma excelente iniciativa deles mostrarem a força do desenvolvedor brasileiro! Que isso sirva de exemplo para os outros, que todos publiquem seus trabalhos no Live!

Abraços,
Ricardo Guerra Freitas

Microsoft Inspiration Tour; Part 4 – XNA

edunhill — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:24:00 GMT

In our fourth and final Inspiration Tour session we explore XNA games development for the Xbox 360 and Windows. Look out for lots of cool demos and games dev basics.

Check out my blog for other cool content and watch this space for more videos soon...

Quickly ramp up on XNA Development, Part 4: Facing your opponent

Diane — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:01:00 GMT

Interested in ramping up on XNA but like to learn in short and sweet videos? Jennifer Marsman has created a short set of videos to help you learn XNA fifteen minutes (or less!) at a time. To get started, Jennifer presents part 2 of the XNA Development Ramp up. In this screencast, she’ll walk through sample code detailing how to make one sprite turn to face another in your Windows or XBOX 360 game using the XNA Framework.

Quickly ramp up on XNA Development, Part 3: Five Essential Methods

Diane — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:22:00 GMT

Interested in ramping up on XNA but like to learn in short and sweet videos? Jennifer Marsman has created a short set of videos to help you learn XNA fifteen minutes (or less!) at a time. To get started, Jennifer presents part 2 of the XNA Development Ramp up. In this screencast, she’ll walk through the essential methods that you need to understand in order to develop a Windows or XBOX 360 game using the XNA Framework.

Quickly ramp up on XNA Development, Part 2: Xbox vs. Windows

Diane — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:25:00 GMT

Interested in ramping up on XNA but like to learn in short and sweet videos? Jennifer Marsman has created a short set of videos to help you learn XNA five minutes (or less!) at a time. To get started, Jennifer presents part 2 of the XNA Development Ramp up. In this screencast, she’ll discuss the differences between developing a Windows game and an XBOX 360 game using the XNA Framework.

Microsoft Inspiration Tour; Part 1 – Introduction to new Technology

edunhill — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:20:00 GMT

This year we’ve been touring UK universities introducing Microsoft’s latest and greatest developer technologies to students and faculty on the Inspiration Tour.

So far we’ve visited over thirty campuses travelling in excess of 7000 miles to speak to 2400 students. We’ve had some great feedback about the content and thought it would be cool to bring it online at Channel8 so we booked out the studio at our UK offices and got recording!

This is the first of four sessions which introduces some of our new technologies including Popfly, Surface and XNA with some awesome demos.

Check back soon as our other three sessions on Silverlight, Windows Embedded and XNA will be published here over the next week!

Quickly ramp up on XNA Development, Part 1: Getting Started

Diane — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:21:00 GMT

Interested in ramping up on XNA but like to learn in short and sweet videos? Jennifer Marsman has created a short set of videos to help you learn XNA five minutes (or less!) at a time. To get started, Jennifer introduces part 1 of the XNA Development Ramp up with an XNA Framework overview. In this screencast, you'll learn the software needed to get started using the XNA Framework to develop games for Windows and the XBOX 360.

Program the picture frame

littleguru — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 06:00:00 GMT

I had also the chance to speak with Olivier Bloch at the TechEd's "Ask The Experts". He's from Microsoft France and there in the embedded devices group.

Olivier showed me some nice gadgets that are all running on Windows CE: it seems like Windows CE really runs on a lot of small devices, even stuff that I didn't think of: like for example a picture frame!

Olivier speaks also about the future of embedded and smart devices and why students should really care about what is coming up in that sector in the future.

Dave Mitchell on what is in XNA 2.0

littleguru — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:57:00 GMT

During the European XNA Tour I had the chance to speak with Dave Mitchell. He's in the XNA team and I could finally ask all my questions on XNA that I had for a long time. We spoke also about the new features that are going to come with XNA 2.0 (that is right now available as BETA from creators.xna.com) and he gave me even some hints on what is going to come in later versions...

Dave showed me also a short trailer of the best games that were in the Dream.Build.Play. contest. I was so excited about it that I packed it right into the video before the actual interview. If you don't like to watch that, skip the first and half minute to get straight to the interview.

XNA Studio 2.0 BETA is here!

littleguru — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:20:00 GMT

This week is a really busy week so far. A lot of new stuff to play with is coming out right now. Today the XNA team has released the first BETA version of XNA Studio 2.0.

What's new?
They support the full version of Visual Studio 2005 (no 2008, I don't know why they are still on Visual Studio 2005). It's cool to have at least the support for the full version because you don't need to install an Express Edition if you got the full version, for example, via MSDN AA.

They added also network support to XNA. You can finally play your games against other people over the network.

A list with all the new features can be found here.

Your Way, Your Play, XNA: Modify a 2D Game in 10 minutes

Lean — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:59:00 GMT

Modify your first 2D Game using XNA Games Studio Express.

I walk you through some of the key gaming concepts and then add in Collision Detection and Score Keeping to the game.

Please visit my blog,

Springboard: From Mortarboard to Onboard, practical skills for employment.

Resources:

- Original 2D Project

- XNA Creators Club

- XNA Team Blog

- TorqueX (Drag & Drop Game Components)

The future of VB.NET

littleguru — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

At the IT conference “TechEd Developers” we had the Chance to talk to Amanda Silver, the Senior Program Manager Lead for Visual Basic and Jay Schmelzer, the Principal Group Program Manager for Visual Basic.

First, we asked what are the strength of Visual Basic. Amanda replied that Visual Basic code is much more readable then other program languages’s code. This means that the code is easier to maintain. Furthermore, the IntelliSense experience has improved in the 2008 Version of Visual Studio. Directly connected to this we asked where Visual Basic will stand in the Future. We focused on positioning of Visual Basic against C# or Java. Amanda highlighted the XML Integration, which is one of the best features of the 9.0 version of Visual Basic. XML is a fist-class data type and Visual Basic becomes a XSLT language. There is also LinQ to XML, which is really powerful. Jay said that Visual Basic 9 is very productive and you can work task-oriented.

Next, we stated that Visual Basic code takes longer to type. Jay and Amanda told us that the IntelliSense has improved a lot and the long typing isn’t really long now. Furthermore we stated that we miss some of the Features Visual Basic offers in C#.

Another interesting technology is Silverlight. Most of the potential Silverlight developers are used to ActionScript in Flash, which is rather similar to JavaScript and JavaScript itself seems to be rather similar to C# - so we wanted to know where they see possibilities for VB in that sector. Amanda explained that maybe the only similarities in C# with ActionScript are the curly brace and the semicolon. Visual Basic supports a lot of interesting features in Silverlight like the event handling, which is much more confortable then in C#, because there is no necessity for Delegates. However, Developers have to find out which language they want to use.

After that we switched to the Micro Framework. Often it looks like Visual Basic would simply be left out there. Here we wanted to know why this is so. According to Amanda, there are some technical limitations that stop Visual Basic from easy adaption for the Micro Framework. The Problem is that Visual Basic is a Hybrid Language and some runtime Components are associated with it. In the 2005 release, the compiler would simply crash if this runtime is not present. Now, in the 2008 Release, the fault tolerance of the compiler was increased and the Compiler will tell that the Application wants to use a language feature of Visual Basic, which is simply not present in the Micro Framework. So it is not possible to use that language Feature.

Next we talked about XNA, which is a very interesting tool. We wanted to know if we can also expect to develop our XNA-Games with Visual Basic in the future. Jay said that it is a similar problem we are facing now with the Micro Framework. There are still some technical limitations, but as XNA is now moving towards Visual Studio 2008, they are working on this issue.

As Visual Basic is very important for Office Development, we asked Amanda and Jay what we can expect from Visual Basic in this Sector. There are the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and VB for Applications (VBA). First it looked like VSTO would replace VBA, now it rather looks like VSTO and VBA would work together. Jay replied that the VSTO and VBA are different. VSTO gives us the ability to built an application based on Office, whereas VBA is about automating Office. They promised us that some pretty exciting stuff will come up, but they cannot talk about this at this time. According to the VSTO, we asked how the Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) comes together with Visual Basic. Jay said that VSTA gives us the ability to customize applications. This is a bit more heavy weighted then VBA is.

As we were also talking about the Future of Visual Basic, we wanted to find out what language facts we can expect in the next release of Visual Basic, that one that comes after Visual Basic 9. Jay said that we can expect something that is even more productive and fun. Amanda said that improving the language and the possibility to write less code is one of the most important facts.

The last question was what they can recommend to the community. Jay encouraged us to get involved in the developments, talk to folks about Visual Basic. Amanda said that it is important to sample code. The more sample code there is, the easier it is for new developers to get into Visual Basic.

The Interview was moderated by Alexander Duggleby and Mario Meir-Huber.

Starting with game development

littleguru — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:26:00 GMT

Ever wanted to start with game development? What technology could you use? There are several around. In the last months we have heard very much about XNA and XNA 2.0. But there are also other libraries around that are very interesting: two of them are DirectX or OpenGL.

For university a friend of mine and I had to write a small game named FishSalad. It's a simple game and we had to write it in OpenGL. DirectX was theoretically allowed but everybody looked weird at you, if you considered using it (university life). I don't regret having done the class and having written the game in OpenGL. The API has an easy to use model (it’s ideal to start with) and makes it easy to switch to DirectX afterwards: the calls are very similar. It's always the same hardware in the end...

There are some very good OpenGL tutorial sites around. I like the collection of tutorials at NeHe's site. It has all the important lessons from how to start with OpenGL (and C/C++) until how to write shaders, cool looking fogs and particle systems. Another interesting read is the OpenGL documentation: the so called Red Book.

DirectX on the other hand is also interesting if you want to program a game for Windows. There's plenty of information on MSDN and there are a lot tutorial websites around. If you have time (and the required hardware) you should have a look at DirectX 10. The geometry shaders look very powerful and interesting.

If you want to start with XNA you should have a look at the link section at the XNA Development website or the creator's website. XNA Development itself has also some interesting and easy to understand tutorials. What makes XNA very interesting is the way how everybody can write small games in a few hours. Very cool!

As for techniques I really wonder when people start to implement relief mapping. It looks awesome and would be the next step after bump mapping. Anybody willing and having some free time?

XNA Studio 2.0 and Gamefest 2007

littleguru — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:59:00 GMT

One year after announcing the first XNA Game Studio the XNA team has announced version 2.0 at the 2007’s Gamefest. The next version is going to be online by the end of this year and contains two major improvements: network support and the possibility to install as add-on for Visual Studio Standard and Professional!

Other improvements like a new XACT Editor and UI simplification are also coming in handy. I had always problems with the XACT Editor in Vista: speaking of random crashes. What's also interesting is that XNA 2.0 allows hosting a game inside a Windows Forms application (as a component). I hope it is also possible to host the component inside a WPF window.

This year's Gamefest was also interesting for people who couldn’t make it there (like many students including me) because Microsoft streamed some interesting talks as webcasts. They are going to be available for view-on-demand in a few days. You should watch them if you hadn't had the time to watch them live and you are interested in XNA, the new networking features or general performance tweaks for .NET applications!

Microsoft has also announced this year’s winners of the XNA "Dream-Build-Play" contest. The games were that good that the first three places have been shared among several projects: there are actually two games on the 1st place and two on the 2nd. I haven't counted the number of games on the third place, but they all look very innovative and interesting.