Sharky has released another update to his XNA Game: Sharkys Air Legends. This update focuses on polishing the game by improving the particle systems, incorporating Xbox LIVE player names and a new Sky Writing mode enabling the player (or players in co-op) to roam around writing messages in the sky.

Read More

Dan Waters released a new article today focusing on Peer-to-peer messaging on the Zune using XNA 3.0 CTP. In this article Dan covers sending, receiving and Processing of Network Messages on the Zune and hints at a big suprise coming soon.

Read More

Today Microsoft announced the pricing plan for your XNA Community Games on Xbox LIVE. This payment plan is fairly flexible allowing you to charge between 2.50 and 10.00 dollars for your game on Xbox LIVE. Microsoft will let you keep 70 percent of the profit and may even advertise the game for you if it is very successful.

Read More on the XNA Team Blog

Xbox Live Community Games

Microsoft has announced Free Four Month Premium Creators Club memberships will be given out to those who submit their final games to the Dream Build Play competition. This is a 49.00 dollar value and will let you develop and test your games on the Xbox 360 for Four months.

Read More

Zbyl has released a .X File Exporter for Google SketchUp. This exporter will allow you to use Google SketchUp as the modelling software for your XNA games.

Read More

Riemer Grootjans has a new article up focusing on generating Perlin Noise in XNA. This article describes how to generate noise on the Pixel Shader which can be used for many effects and generated geometry such as terrains.

Read More

I have been working on getting the XNA Article Contest entries online. So far I have uploaded a dozen articles and hope to get the rest online in the next few days so the judging period can begin.


Shady - 2D HLSL Editor

Using XML to add skinning support to a GUI system

Dynamic Key Mappings

How to capture a screenshot

Creating a Menu in Xna

3D Transformation Manipulators (Translation/Rotation/Scale)

Playing Nice Animations on XNA

Motion Blur in XNA

Relationship Between Angle and Directional Vector

Language Localization in XNA

Fur Rendering in XNA

Game State Management For the Rest of Us

Catalin Zima has released a new Sample for July focusing on Rim Lighting in XNA. Rim Lighting is used in games like Super Mario Galaxy to give a real cool effect.

Read More

The 9th LIFE - A Cat Role Playing Game - for the XBOX 360 and Windows. This game is the ultimate cat lovers RPG where you actually play as a cat.

Archor Games

The 9th Life Website

The 9th Life on GameProjects

Mahdi Bahrami from Iran has released his 2D game: Koochooloo (means tiny and smart in Persian). This game is about a worm which becomes a butterfly at the end of game.

Download Koochooloo

Graphics Runner has a new article and sample showing how to do Dual-Parabaloid Reflections, Shadow Mapping and Variance Shadow Mapping in XNA. This technique produces high quality results in real time.

Dual-Paraboloid Reflections

Dual-Paraboloid Shadow Mapping

Dual-Paraboloid Variance Shadow Mapping

Riemer Grootjans has updated his XNA tutorials to be XNA 2.0 compatible. Riemer has an extensive list of articles focusing on XNA with a great series on HLSL, terrain, water, shadowing and alot more. Riemer will be releasing new articles over the next few days so be sure to check back often. You can stay up to date with Riemers articles with his RSS feed that will be updated on a regular basis.

Riemers Web Site

The entry period is now over for the Ziggyware Summer 2008 XNA Article Contest. This has been the most productive contest to date with over 25 entries received. I will spend the next few days uploading and verifying articles and after all the articles are online the judging period will begin. I would like to thank everyone who entered an article. Keep checking back as the articles go online!

Nick Gravelyn has written Minimalist versions of the XNA Game Studio 2.0 Windows and Xbox 360 game templates. These minimal templates remove the comments, unnecessary methods and move the Main method to Game1.cs, eliminating the need for a seperate source file: Program.cs.

Read More

EvilNado has released a new 2D Map Editor for XNA Game Studio. This map editor has some nice features including the ability to zoom in and out which is very nice indeed.

Read More

Ruben Lopez created a new content pipeline importer to import animated characters into XNA Game Studio 2.0. This Content Pipeline uses the Cal3D file format. Cal3D is a free 3D modelling software that you can now use with XNA thanks to Ruben.

Read More

Alex Urbano has released a new LED Display Component. Full source code included for XNA GS 2.0.

Read More

GameDev.NET has released the full PDF versions of the ShaderX² books: "Shader Programming Tips and Tricks with DirectX 9.0" and "Introductions and Tutorials with DirectX 9.0" from Wordware Publishing.

Shader Programming Tips and Tricks with DirectX 9.0
Introductions and Tutorials with DirectX 9.0

Read More

FX Composer 2.5, the latest version of NVIDIA's powerful shader development environment, has been released. FX Composer supports DirectX, OpenGL, HLSL, Collada FX, and CgFX, as well as the .fbx

Read More

The June CTP version of Karvonite has been released. Karvonite is a free persistence framework for the .NET Framework (including XNA) that lets you easily serialize/deserialize objects.

Karvonite June 2008 CTP