Hi all,
I know it’s been a while and believe me, no one regrets me not having enough time to release samples more than me, but sometimes that’s the way it is. I believe last time I left you all with a big tease about that dynamic 2D image based shadows sample… I promise I will release it at some point in the future (hopefully sooner rather than later), even if it’s just the code, without a full-fledged tutorial.

On a more happy note, I have been re-awarded the title of XNA/DirectX MVP for 2010, and I’m extremely happy about it. Especially so because this is a great year for XNA, with the release of a new version and a new platform, and I’m glad to be in the middle of it. So enough mushy-wushy talk… What did I do this year to deserve this? Here’s a list of some of my contributions to the XNA community throughout 2010:

• I’ve had my share of posts on the XNA forums. I hope at least half of them helped someone out.
• Held a talk about XNA game programming at a local university in Cluj-Napoca
• Held a two-part online webcast course for a university in Iasi
• The World of Goo Mouse Cursor sample
• The “Mass Effect”-like dialog sample
• The XNA 3.1 Video sample
• Small tutorial for using ToonBoom to make your animations and import them into XNA.
• A Crash Course in HLSL (also published here)
• Teamed up with some great people and brought SgtConker.com on the world (as Captain ZSquare), where I:
  • Wrote a few entries in the Scrolls from the Past series
  • Reposted some of my old tutorials from Ziggyware (fur and multi-threading)
  • Gathered and posted links to XNA-related stuff and other News items
  • Made plans for other cool stuff on sgtconker, but didn’t have time to bring them to completion 😀

That’s about it. Looking back, the list is not as long as I would have liked, but it’s been a busy year for me, so I take shelter is knowing that I did as much as I could 🙂

I’ll try to post more cool or interesting stuff later this year, so stay tuned! Also, watch www.sgtconker.com for other XNA news and articles!