XNA Tutorials, Samples and Thoughts
Archive for October, 2008
October Sample: ppt in XNA
Oct 29th
Did any of you ever wish to play a PowerPoint presentation inside an XNA application?
… anyone?….
Well, for the two of you who may be interested… now you can! Check out my October sample where you can see how to use a custom content importer and processor to load data from .ppt files, and draw it in XNA.
Read more information and download the sample here.
Ziggware Fall 2008 XNA Article Contest: Win a 360!
Oct 14th
Ziggyware hosts a new Article and Tutorial contest, with an exciting prize: an Xbox 360 Elite, and two 1 year Creator’s Club Subscriptions.
All you have to do is write a cool tutorial, and submit it before November 30′th 2008.
For more details, click the image below to go to the contest’s page.
First look at Community Games in the NXE ?
Oct 3rd
I was just reading about the New Xbox Experience on the Gamerscore Blog, and I noticed one interesting screenshot.
It seems like this is how the Community Games marketplace will look like. Besides it looking awesome, we can see that we will have a “New Arrivals” page, a “Most popular” page, and will be able to list all games.
I’m still curious about the few games appearing behind these pages. Is this how games will be “featured” by Microsoft, in exchange for a lower revenue? If this is it, it looks great to me, and I sure wouldn’t mind my game being featured like that.
P.S. can anyone tell me what the second game is ? (between Word Soup and Collosseum)
Status Update
Oct 3rd
Hi, everyone.
Don’t worry, I’m still here. The last month was a busy one. After working hard to catch the Dream Build Play deadline, I needed to take a few days of vacation from coding and prepare for moving my stuff to Cluj-Napoca again, to start my last year at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
Now I’m all settled in, and I’ll return to playing around with XNA, designing/implementing future games, writing samples and helping out in the forums whenever I catch some free time 
For now, I’m working on a technique to do decals in XNA. It is very hard to find any documentation or tutorials related to decals, so I’m experimenting pretty much on my own. I don’t have anything to show right now, but I will hopefully be able to finish this sample soon, and post it online for all to see.
After that, my plan is to start working on a series of samples that exemplify various spell effects. We’ll see how that goes…
If you have any ideas for future samples that you would like to see (anything except physics), please post them here, and I’ll see what I can do about them in the coming months.
