BetaSDK / News: Recent posts

I must apologize that I've put this project on the back burner for so long but I'm getting ready to revive the project. I'm currently looking for other developers to assist with the project. If you're interested in helping out with this project please contact me.

Although refactoring is still on-going, several significant milestones have been met which prompted an early release of the BetaSDK to share with the community.

XBox360 Support
HLSL Support
Significant Refactoring
Video Caps Logger

There are several other enhancements which I've probably missed but refactoring has been an on-going effort along with additional development since I just recently acquired an XBox 360 and an XNA Creator's Club account. I'm pleased to find that all of my efforts have been well rewarded with a functioning SDK that works well on both the PC and the XBox 360 platform. Because of this I've released the BetaSDK in it's current form to share the progress with the community.... read more

While refactoring the BetaSDK project, new work started and is now very close to complete (within a couple of days) to integrate some of the more advanced features of the XNA GDK such as lighting and shader effects.

In the next few days you can look forward to seeing the following enchancements.

Structured object model
Hardware controls exposed
Lighting effect support
Pixel Shader sprite support

The following class has just been added to encompass the majority of the XNA SpriteBatch class, ShaderContext. The ShaderContext class will allow complete integration of SpritEffect resources into a BetaSDK based project.... read more

The size of the BetaSDK has just reached the first tier which in my opinion requires refactoring the various projects into more concise projects. As a result I have split out the various archives according to roles. In an effort to balance my engineering time with research and development, this project has been organically grown since I'm currently the only developer involved with the project.

Since it's inception (just two months ago) I believe I've made significant progress in developing an efficient and robust framework for creating a mechanically derived game/simulator application (as opposed to creatively derived). As a result of my self proclaimed success however, the project has organically grown over and is currently being pruned and trimmed. Please forgive the current mess, the project will be cleaned up shortly.... read more

Recently, I was experimenting with the template wizard for item creation in Visual Studio 2010 and decided I would share with you an example template for creating a GameActor using the BetaSDK.

Enjoy!
Robert Butler

The Compartment class has been extended to encapsulate all Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.ModelMesh objects when a Model is loaded. The Compartment class allows for independent mesh manipulation allowing mechnical animation at runtime and insulating the composite model from local model space transformation.

Enjoy!
Robert Butler

Scene Effects are now available. You can bind a GameActor class to the BetaSDK.Game object to get a callback when scene lighting needs to be applied. Also, GameActor and VisibleActor classes have been refactored to allow for additional pre and post draw processing on every frame.

Thanks,
Robert Butler

Now available is a working demonstration of the BetaSDK framework applied to a simple animation sample acquired from the AppHub community site. The demonstration illustrates how using the BetaSDK framework reduced the amount of game logic for a mechnical animation from dozens of lines of impractical calculations down to just a few simple logic instructions.

The source for the original XNA AppHub example can be found on creators.xna.com.... read more

The latest update includes the following enhancements.

Working Newtonian physics engine. (Vincent can now jump!)
Encapsulated sampler state parameters.
Sealed XNA update and draw.
Implemented Z-order sorting filter in the BetaSDK.Game component.

Enjoy!
Robert Butler

Although the current state of the project is not ideal in my opinion, I felt it necessary to at least publish an update to the source which includes some of the features promised in my last news update. Some of the struggles I've been wrestling with in getting all of the features into the SDK which would be necessary to develop a fully functional game have been worked out and should be evident in this latest release.... read more

Sorry for the delay in posting updates for the BetaSDK. After the initial project creation, there were daily updates simply because the areas of the SDK which needed to be improved were already known and the improvements to the SDK were posted as soon as each batch of additions or improvements were implemented.

The focus of the development thus far has been centered on providing enough of a framework which several open source or freeware resources could be leveraged to pull together enough game assets with minimal investment to create a truly innovative game for demonstration on the XNA platform.... read more