DotNetKicks.com - Stories tagged with XNA

Draw Horizontally Centered Text in XNA

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:13:32 GMT

Because there is no built in function for centering text drawn to the screen in XNA, I have created a small static method that will take in a string and draw it centered horizontally on the screen.

Embedding XNA Game in Windows.Forms

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:57:56 GMT

A small article explaining how to add embed a XNA Game into a Windows Form.

Picking

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:34:14 GMT

Sean James describes several methods of picking using XNA, tying it all together by providing some code to implement the most efficient and useful approach: Geometry Approximation Picking.

SilverSprite - XNA Games in Silverlight

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:19:50 GMT

Bill Reiss is building games in Silverlight, but he also likes to build games in XNA. The obvious move then is to create a library that allows you to run XNA games within Silverlight. And no code changes to the XNA games would be ideal. That's exactly what Bill has done, and the code library's name is SilverSprite.

XNA Game Engine Tutorial Series

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:48:14 GMT

Series covering the development of a full featured game engine in XNA. The series includes every single line of code, and also has descriptions and explanations of what is being done in the code and what each of the various components written do and how they work.

Advanced Event Handling

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:42:00 GMT

This sample expands on the concepts learned in the tutorial "Basic Event Handling" by creating a static event class that can be used to invoke event data that has been subscribed to an event argument. This class eliminates the need of creating separate methods to subscribe, unsubscribe, or invoke each event you may have created because it uses generics and any type of event argument will work with it.

2D Reflections (Xbox 360 NXE Dashboard)

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:51:17 GMT

Learn to create dynamic 2D reflections from textures and stylize them into a system similar to the Xbox 360 NXE Dashboard. Included sample, written in XNA 3.0, contains a working example and is fairly commented for explanations. Use the 'A' and 'D' keys to scroll between each texture.

How To Enable Anti-Aliasing

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:36:23 GMT

The process of smoothing the edges of triangles by averaging neighboring pixels in a render target is known an anti-aliasing or multisampling. In simple terms, it removes jagged edges. This article will show one technique of how to enable the highest sample type available on the user's machine.

HLSL Shaders

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:29:42 GMT

Koen Samyn, lecturer interactive programming at the University College of West Flanders (curriculum Digital Arts and Entertainment) wrote an excellent KNOL (a unit of knowledge) on HLSL Shaders. You can find the article here: http://knol.google.com/k/samyn-koen/-/2lijysgth48w1/2# Extract: What is a shader ? A shader ( or effect) is a program that is executed on the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit). The GPU is located on the graphics card off course and the GPU contains many cores that can execute a shader program concurrently. This allows the GPU to have high throughput (number of triangles that can be processed per second). If for example a GPU has 4 available cores (run of the mill GPU have much more then that) each code transform the vertices of 4 triangles simultaneously. There are several shader API's and languages that are targeted to curent GPU's : .

Clean Up Your Player Movement Code

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:47:53 GMT

Make the code that you use to test for player movement/input a bit easier to read.

XNA Society - Simulating Planetary 2D Gravity

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:47:06 GMT

If you've ever wanted to or planned on making a 2D space game, then this tutorial might be of interest to you. By the time you are finished reading it, you will know how to simulate planetary gravity. In other words, you will be simulating the gravity field that surrounds planets, such as Earth, which pulls objects towards it.

XNA Society - Story Development and Game Design (Part 2)

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:42:03 GMT

Thus far, story development using the Heroic Monomyth technique has been discussed. This next part of the article is going to focus on designing a game using preliminary and technical design documents.

Alpha blending in XNA

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 01:43:00 GMT

A brief overview of how to enable alpha transparency in XNA, with a simple demo.

Collision Textures and 2DRenderTargets in XNA

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 10:00:54 GMT

I started making a Tower Defense Game which I will be sharing soon, including all my trials and tribulations and the theory behind it. Whilst making it I came across an interesting problem, which was how to tell whether or not the user could place the tower where they currently have the cursor. I thought about it for a while and then decided that the best method would be a sort of collision texture whereby you have a texture 'underneath' the main texture which outlines the areas where a tower can and cannot be placed (thought this texture is never actually rendered).

A Simple Way to Pause Your Game

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:47:10 GMT

Pausing your game is a nice and easy feature to add to your XNA game.

Starting Game Dev With Space Invaders

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:35:26 GMT

A tutorial about start getting into Game Dev with making Space Invaders with C#.NET and XNA game studio. It only take 1h30 to complete the code. You will be surprise how easy to make a simple game nowaday.

XNA Society - Story Development and Game Design (Part 1)

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:38:20 GMT

Developing a game from start to finish is no easy task. It requires a lot of patience and a massive amount of dedication. This article is intended to help relieve some pressure by easing the process of coming up with creative ideas and then shaping them into fully developed games.

XNA Society - Serializing and Deserializing XML Documents

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:29:28 GMT

The purpose of XML serialization is to enable the conversion of XML documents to runtime objects and vice-versa. When you serialize data, a new document is created and the data is saved to it. However, when you deserialize data, the document is loaded and the data is converted into a managed object.

Simulating Planetary 2D Gravity

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:29:01 GMT

XNA Society - Basic Event Handling

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:28:20 GMT

Event handling is a simple task to accomplish and can be extremely useful. It allows your coding to be more flexible because custom actions can be written and applied without the need of changing the game's base code.

XNA Society - Alpha Masking

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:27:45 GMT

Alpha masks add transparency to images and allow regular square images to become any shape imaginable. This tutorial is going to show you how to apply an alpha mask to an image.

XNA Society - Starting A Game Editor (WinForms)

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:27:16 GMT

Game editors are used to make creating a game much easier. This tutorial is going to show you how to start a game editor with a splash screen for use in your XNA game. Tutorial includes project files written in XNA 3.0 and VS2008.

XNA Society - Basic 2D Collision

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:26:37 GMT

This sample uses XNA 3.0 and shows how to do rectangle-rectangle, circle-rectangle, and circle-circle collisions with very simplistic and unrealistic physics.

«Chronicles of an Independent Video Game Company» » Blog Archive » XNA

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 01:46:12 GMT

XNA Game development and design

XNA Game Studio 3.0 is Here

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:33:13 GMT

XNA Game Studio 3.0 expands on all the offerings of earlier iterations to include additional functionality to appeal to game developers of every level and enable them to create games to distribute through Xbox LIVE Community Games on the Xbox 360 as part of the New Xbox Experience.