Tools We can Use & XNA Roundup
28Apr2009

A summary of the resources we have access to

• infoguides.sdsu.edu/ I am hearing that Academic Search Premier returns better articles than ProQuest Research Library. Your thoughts?
• www.gamasutra.com/features/19970912/design_doc_anatomy.htm Game Document, originally published in Game Developer Magazine
• Sharing Your Source Code and Assets (msdn)
• www.cdrinfo.com/sections/news/Details.aspx?NewsId=14842 Xbox 360 Architecture
• www.stewart.cs.sdsu.edu/SDSU/msdnaa Our CS majors resource of free software with instructions for burning ISO images
• http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Virtual-CD-DVD-Rom/Virtual-CloneDrive.shtml Virtual Clone Drive for Windows Vista, avoid using CDs (with Prof. Roch's instructions)
• SDSU Computer Science web-based access to MSDN Academic Alliance - direct link to MSDNAA

• Sam Stokes, blogs.msdn.com/devschool/ and research

• msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx MSDN Developer Network - we focus on Development Tools and Languages
• FAQ, msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203941(XNAGameStudio.20).aspx FAQ for XNA Game Studio 2.0
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/default.aspx XNA Developer Center (free downloads and FAQs)
• XNA Creators Club, http://creators.xna.com/en-US/ - you have a free membership from the MSDNAA site
• Riemer's 2D & 3D XNA Tutorials, www.riemers.net/
• What about story line in your group game? The software tool FRAPS www.fraps.com/ does a good job of capturing the action on the screen. The free version limits captures to 30 second, which is plenty of time to highlight some particular facet of your game for the user.
• What have you found most useful?

XNA Roundup #10, Top 10 Xbox Live community Games (thanks Travess O.)

twitter.com/xnaroundup nicktheduderino

The Need for Speed (a 3d racing game)

http://www.1amstudios.com/games/NeedForSpeed/ 1am studios
You can download the zip-file of the game. Note, in the comments of the web page, the author states:
"Need for Speed:XNA is an XNA/C# game I wrote from scratch. It took me about 6 months of work off and on. The code is all mine, but it uses the original Need for Speed data (textures, models, tracks). Information on the file formats was reverse engineered by Denis Auroux (mostly) and myself.

I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons: To learn more about 3D coding, to play NFS1 again (the original won't run on modern Windows), and as to see if its possible to replicate (a small amount!) of a groundbreaking 14 year old game.

While working on NFS, I learnt a lot of XNA tricks and really came to appreciate the skill of the original programmers. These days computers have so much space and power, programmers can get away with being lazy. Back in 1995 things were very different...

A single example - the type of track boundary and where the boundary is located is all packed into a single byte.

You can race around every track, with basic vehicle and engine physics, collision detection and sound. There is no collision detection for traffic in this version. "

XNA Roundup no. 11 Solar and Battle Havoc