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How many times has it happened where you have this one class, let’s say it’s a spaceship that was destroyed. Now you have tell all other dependent objects that she died, any independent sprite animation class, AI, etc etc because they were relying on her. Another thing is, in my case, having a scene that contains all the objects and by deleting the ship It won’t get removed from the scene, keeping the reference alive and so Garbage collector won’t kick in. Deleting and removing from the list is a way, but why should you inside the spaceship class have know how to remove from the Scene list? Makes no sense. The list should know how to treat a deleted object. ...

No, I’m not dead….yet… It’s just that I’ve been stuck on Different Pixel development dungeon for the past weeks finishing and polishing (bug hunting) my first game, Vizati. Most of you have been following the process and asking things every since we showed the beta version at XNA Pizza Night, after which we decided to finish the game and try to sell it to see how it goes. Three months later and here I am, making the final touches on the game before it’s release on 11th June. The game will be available thought GamersGate (maybe others, I’ll update in the future). ...

It’s been awhile since my last post. I’ve been utterly busy so I haven’t had the time for any tutorials. This week I got an invitation from João Antão to showcase Vizati as part of his XNA Framework presentation. This occurred during the Imagine Cup final on Portugal. I’ve been playing with the WP7 tools and I decided to try and port Vizati to XNA 4.0 and give it a try on the emulator so I could show all 3 versions running simultaneous. The result was pretty good i think. It’s virtually identical. ...

I’ve seen this quite a bit around on XNA forums and got 2 emails last week asking about this: I want to make a 3000×3000 grass background by tiling this small grass image I have. Should I make one big image or should I make a for cycle drawing the image (3000/TileSize) times? My answer is neither of them. The big image has a huge impact on every Draw and more, you are limiting your map to the max Texture Size the graphic card can handle. ...

Yesterday was an exciting one for all sorts of developers around the world. Visual Studio 2010 got available for both MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers. First time I installed VS2010 was in the RC form mainly because of WP7 Developer’s Tools and XNA4.0 but haven’t made many investment in searching for new features. But being available at Dreamspark I downloaded the Professional version and decided to try it out a bit. On a side note to WP7 developers, if you are using VS RC to develop application to the phone don’t install the RTM version of VS2010 since it’s not compatible with WP7 developer tools yet. You have to stick with the RC for now. ...

Note: 22/04/2013 – Due to popular request I made an article about achieving this effect in OpenGL Independent Resolution Rendering?? What’s this all about? Basically a way of not caring what you resolution is. Ever had Gui elements misplaced because you changed the resolution? Or getting out of the screen? If you are doing a game on Xna just for Xbox360 you can basically use a 1280×720 base resolution and the Xbox will scale the game for you making the proper Letterbox. ...

Microsoft FxCop, know what this is all about? Good for you, keep using it, It’s a valuable tool. For those who don’t know you can download it here and read the MSDN documentation here. FxCop is a is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. I decided to make a profile of my current working project and it reported tons of stuff. ...

So I was watching Microsoft Mix10 and while talking about the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. What? But like now now? I went to http://developer.windowsphone.com/ and XNA Creator’s Club and there it was. The packages contains: A CTP of the new Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone Tools and framework to develop Windows Phone applications and games with Silverlight A CTP of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that allows you to develop Windows Phone games with the XNA Framework A Windows Phone 7 Series emulator that can be used to deploy and debug Windows Phone applications and games Add-on to allow you to use the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate to develop Windows Phone applications and games if you have it installed Pretty good right? For those who have been living under a rock the XNA 4.0 brings another development platform, Windows Phone 7 series, which leaves us with XBOX360, PC and the new mobile. ...

Damn you should see my face when they told me we won the competition XNA Pizza Night 2010 at Microsoft. Originally we developed Vizati to enter Dream Build Play 2010. We started developing the game on the beginning of February and during that month we discovered another competition would be held near Dream Build Play deadline. We went there with the same demo we sent to DBP. The audience really liked the game and we got very positive feedback. I remember during the first minutes someone in the audience asking if the game was already on sale and where could they buy it. ...

Rita and I have been working on a demo for entering Dream Build Play competition and today she has finally finished the teaser for Vizati. It’s our game for entering the Dream Build Play 2010 competition and XNA Pizza Night. We started working on this around 3 weeks ago so it’s still an early draft from our vision of the game. Vizati is a puzzle game made by Different Pixel for Dream Build Play 2010 in which you need to connect the little vizati stones by color. There’s 2 different modes of playing it. One of them is story mode where the stone Vizati is discovered by some people and they try to find out what it is and uncover it’s secrets. The other one, Arcade mode is a more traditional way to play it but with special vizati stones and power-ups ...