XNA UK User Group

Hey Mark,

Welcome. Did we see you at the Freeplay event in Nottingham? There were a fair few Derby Uni folks there.

Cheers,
Leaf.

O game city Leaf? Yeah I was there. Went back a few different days to catch some of the other talks were impressed by the natural motion gear especially.

Greetings folks,

 My name's Richard Fine, I'm a third year CS student at Oxford University. In my spare time I run a game development website. I'm also an XNA/DirectX MVP, which is partly why I'm here - though of course I am actually using XNA as well :-) My current pet project is to try creating a clone of the Phoenix Wright games on the DS, but to have it running on the 360.

 Looks like a nice place you've got here... :-)

Good day all, my name's Barnaby. Game dev is one of my passions and I've been messing around with it since I was 10. I'm currently in my first year at University of Huddersfield where i'm studying Computer Games Programming. As part of the course we're learning XNA, and with GS 2.0 out now I'll be looking into networking and seeing what I can do with it.

There's a few projects I'd like to work on, though as a programmer my designing sucks so fingers crossed I'll find some people interested in helping out. Though I'll talk more about them at a later date. My gamertag is also Spartan MVI if you want to add me.

Cheers,

Barnaby 

Hi I'm Mark, like Barnaby I am on the Computer Games Programming Course at Huddersfield University but am currently in my final year working like a man possessed trying to finish my dissertation and all the rest of the gubbins that comes with it. Most of my XNA experience comes from working at Canalside Studios during my placement year when we where lucky enough to be a joint runner up at DBP with Yo Ho Kablammo. However, most of my time was spent with a colleague on a seperate game called Gravitas that was later renamed to G-Cubed when someone thought of checking a dictionary to see if Gravitas was a word lol.

 I started off programming at college with VB then used Dark Basic in my first year at uni along with Java. C++ is what i have used since other than during my placement, which mostly involved C# & XNA. As for games that are currently taking up my disk drives, the 360 tends to have either Pes or Fifa loaded in whilst the PC will have one of the Baulder's Gate series in it after I have completed my final year. I'm a big fan of martial arts and sci fi films Seven Samurai and the new Battlestar Gallactica series probrably being my favourites.

 So if anyone fancies a game of Pes or Fifa my gamertag is CrazedTurnip.

 Cheers,

Mark.

Rob here. Old enough to have got the hang of games dev by now, but just never quite managed it.  Used to code Atari ST demos back in the old days, but mostly I code boring office applications, databases, that kind of stuff.  At least its in C# though.

 

Hello peeps... I'm Steve, and I have recently been getting sucked-in by XNA. I found this forum by accident, and thought to myself... "Hmmm, I never seen this before"... So, now you have another lodger in the member list .

Hello Steve, Rob, Mark, Barnaby and Richard - thanks for joining our little community!

Now get posting : ) Tell us what you'd like to see here, what you're working on and what the user group could do for YOU!

Rob

I'll be releasing a beta of Insane game 3 within a couple of weeks for you guys to try out. 

I really should use this forum more.  I tend to use forums just to track new releases or announcements - or to find testers ;)

 Ooh, Insane Game 3 beta you say? Yes please.

oooooh, I would like a copy please :P

Some of you may have noticed already, but I posted the .ccgame of my entry of insane game to the dream build play competition here: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/17876.aspx.

For those who saw an earlier version of it at the show&tell, I managed to speed up the terrain generation on the 360 in the end, and it DID involve generating the procedural texture on the graphics card :P

The 360 cpu really does seem to have problems in xna.  There's still some stuff I can shift over or precalculate, but it's certainly very playable now with terrain on.

 

I was going to release a windows version especially for you guys, but I got a bit carried away trying to add AI and so didn't get round to packaging a solid version before disappearing to find a flat in cambridge (I'm still there now).

Post about it here and on the xna forum if you have any comments, thanks :)

Hey Duncan! I'm downloading it now, shame we couldn't play this 4 player when you brought it along to the show and tell earlier this year. I'll try and get a few peeps round to have a go, looks great fun!

 Hi All,

I'm Deejay, writing XBLCG's under the name Binary Tweed. I'm was a J2EE developer for a financial firm for three years, and then went on to manage a team of 16 developers, designers and usability professionals. What with the credit crunch and all, I found myself with a burning need to develop games and a large wad of redundancy cash, so here I am!

 I'm currently working on a game for release in January on XBLCG. If it goes amazingly well, I hope to expand the games studio business and expand to other platforms. If it doesn't go so well, I'm hoping that having a commercially-available title will help me move from the intolerably dull world of finance and start project managing or team managing in the games industry.