October 2006 - Posts

After a day and half of geek sessions, cool people, a big saturday night party (from 9 PM to 4 AM) and our XNA speech and demo, I've finally arrived home to finish packaging before going to Australia on vacations.

I've meet some fantastic people, speaked with some friends, like Marino Posadas, and had an excellent and funny weekend.

Just before closing my laptop to finish preparations, I wanted to upload the speech Vicente and I gave, so here they are:
· Demo source (slides in spanish, code in english, including comments. For XNA GSE Beta 1).

The ppt is very small (we didn't wanted to spend too many speaking just with slides), and gives a brief view of XNA, it's versions, it's basics, GameComponents, GameServices,...
And the demo is a 2D framework we've built to ease 2D game development with XNA. The demo is a small, turn-based fighting game (like Final Fantasy's combats), with XBox controller or mouse input, 6 custom gamecomponents (registered as gameServices), 2D sprite animations, a small GUI (context menus), an asset manager (to handle all assets/resources),...
It's not very visually impressive (we're developers :P) but we're very proud of the result of just few weeks of coding and learning XNA.

I hope it's useful to understand how gamecomponents and gameservices work in the XNA application model.

See ya after my vacations!

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After a small delay, finally it's here. Just be careful that it's not supported by XNA right now.

It has some new features, improvements (in XACT, XInput, shader compilers...), but the most important feature is that Managed DirectX 2.0 has been finally removed (as it's going to be replaced with XNA in the near future).

 

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I'm working on one thing, and that thing it its...a speech for Madrid CodeCamp 2006 (28/29th of October).

Madrid CodeCamp 2006

Once again, ilitia will colaborate with four speeches, of which I'll be doing one about XNA, with my pal Vicente, administrator and project leader of the opensource, ManagedDirectX Jade Engine (in which I'm a developer too after it went opensource). Last year's Managed DirectX speech slides and demo sources are already available in english.

We will explain what is XNA, what it will be and the different versions will be launched, and then show a mini-game made with XNA (which will be released along with the slides, and translated to english so non-spanish people can download from here too). I can only say it's not the typical pong or tetris clone :)

Unfortunately, the event has so much expectation MSDN has already run out of invitations (we'll be 200 people)...

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There are things I can't understand of the spanish videogame market.

One of them is the "European fool conversion" which means that if a console costs xxx dolars, in Europe we will pay the same xxx but changing dolars to euros. Hopefuly this will change with the Wii and PS3, as they don't have regions so probably I'll try to import one (even with import taxes it's cheaper than buying it in Spain, for example).

But one I've recently suffered when trying to buy a game for my XBox 360 is really annoying. I wanted the game Burnout Revenge, but I couldn't find it in any store. The game was launched in march, even en Europe, and there are lots of reviews in spanish websites and magazines, so the game came here... But it's impossible to find.

So I've had to buy it from play.com (thanks to PlanetPhillip for his post about where he was buying his 3D shooters). And now they've got a new customer (free delivery, few days until arrival of orders and sometimes they have cool offers), so less money spent in Spain, more spent somewhere else.

BTW, I'm a bit off in terms of coding... just working on one subject I'll post soon.

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