August 2007 - Posts

• Robin posts Procedural Worlds Part 1.

  Just in case you hadn't noticed (use the feeds, Luke!), Robin posted the first part of an article on procedural worlds on our XNAGoodies blog.
  
  Posted Aug 26 2007, 08:32 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: articles

• Texture Resizing Pipeline Processor Sample

  A new sample has been posted, showing how to resize textures in the content pipeline. Download it here:

  Pipeline Processor For Resizing Textures.

  Posted Aug 15 2007, 04:45 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: samples

• Softimage Releases New XSI Mod Tool

  Softimage have released a new version of their free XSI Mod Tool. This is a cut down version of XSI that can be used with XNA and Valve's Source Engine (such as Half Life 2).

  Unlike previous versions of the Mod Tool which required exporting to DirectX .x mesh files to import into XNA GSE, this version comes with a custom importer for XNA GSE that uses the Crosswalk SDK to import .xsi and .dae (COLLADA) files. The processor spits out the usual Model type but includes XSI specific animation data in the Model.Tag member and there is sample code showing you how to use the animation data. In other words, apart from a few rough edges, you can make an animated scene in XSI and then export and view that animated scene in your XNA game.

  The Mod Tool has an XNA GSE addon that manages the creation and export of your models into a particular project, including a nice feature to diagnose your model and inform you of any potential problems. It's a little rough but given that its written in JScript it might be possible to improve or customize it to your needs.

  It's good to see another addition to the growing line of software that supports the XNA Framework.

  Posted Aug 14 2007, 05:11 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: pipeline, collada, xsi

• Xna Framework 2.0 Announced

  We all knew this was coming but here's the official announcement. You can also watch a live broadcast from Gamefest 2007 right here, right now. As a tools guy I'm interested to know more about the content pipeline changes, having processor parameters will be very helpful.
   

  Posted Aug 13 2007, 06:13 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: 2.0, gamefest

• Corrupt File Downloads with Internet Explorer

  Adam Miles just spotted that the last two files I uploaded (Texture Atlas Content Pipeline and Visual Studio 2008 Xna Windows Game Project Template) are corrupted when downloading with Internet Explorer. They are both fine if you use Firefox. The versions that IE downloads are smaller so they might have been truncated. This only seems to happen for those two files, not sure if that's because they are both quite small (under 20k) or a problem with how I uploaded them. I'll report this to the Community Server team to see if they have any suggestions.
  

  Posted Aug 10 2007, 12:36 PM by leaf with no comments

  Filed under: site

• Texture Atlas Sample

  They say you should 'release early and release often'. So that's what I've done, I've released a texture atlas pipeline sample early -  before it was entirely finished actually. But one our lovely members was having a little trouble with similar code so here it is. This is just the run-time types and the custom pipeline importer and processor, no sample (actually a sample would be very boring). The pipeline imports and processes the output from Nvidia's texture atlas tool, that combines many textures into one.

  Texture Atlas Content Pipeline 

  Posted Aug 09 2007, 11:41 AM by leaf with 1 comment(s)

  Filed under: samples, pipeline, texture atlas