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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• MVP Summit 2011 summary and thoughts: The &ldquo;I hope I don&rsquo;t cross a line and lose my MVP status&rdquo; post

  - by George Clingerman

  I've been wanting to write this post summarizing my thoughts about the MVP summit but have been dragging my feet since it's a very difficult one to write. However seeing Andy (http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx) and Catalin (http://www.catalinzima.com/2011/03/mvp-summit-2011/) and Chris (http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx) post about it has encouraged me to finally take the plunge. I'm going to have to write carefully though because I'm going to be dancing around a ton of NDA mine fields as well as having to walk the tight-rope of not sending the wrong message or having people read too much into what I'm saying. I want to note that most of what I'm about to say is just based on my observations, they're not thoughts that Microsoft has asked me to pass along and they're not things I heard Microsoft say. It's just me sharing what I think after going to the MVP summit. Let's start off with a short imaginary question and answer session.     Has the App Hub forums and XBLIG management been rather poor by Microsoft? Yes.     Do I think we're going to see changes to that overnight? No.     Will it continue to look bad from the outside? Somewhat. Confusing right? Well that's kind of how things are right now. Lots of confusion. XNA is doing AWESOME. Like, really, really awesome. As a result of that awesomeness, XNA is on three major platforms: Xbox 360, WP7 and PC. This means that internally Microsoft is really excited and invested in the technology. That's fantastic for XNA and really should show you the future the framework has. It's here to stay. So why are Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers feeling so much pain? The ironic thing is that pain is being caused by the success of XNA. When XNA was just a small thing, there was more freedom and more focus. It was just us and them. We were an only child. Now our family has grown and everyone has and wants some time with XNA. This gets XNA pulled in all directions and as it moves onto new platforms, it plays catch up trying to get those platforms up to speed to where Xbox LIVE Indie Games has grown. Forums, documentation, educational content. They all need to be there because Xbox LIVE Indie Games has all of that and more. Along with the catch up in features/documentation/awesomeness there's the catch up that the people on the team have to play. New platforms and new areas of development mean new players and those new guys don't have the history of being around from the beginning. This leads to a lack of understanding at times just how important some things are because they seem so small and insignificant (Rich Text defaulting for new forum profiles would be one things that jumps to mind). If you're not aware that the forums have become more than just a basic Q&A, if you're not aware that they're a central hub to a very active community, then you don't understand why that small change should be prioritized over something else. New people have to get caught up and figure out how to make a framework and central forum site work for everyone it's now serving. So yeah, a lot of our pain this last year has been simply that XNA is doing well and XBLIG is doing well so the focus was shifted to catch other things up. It hurts when a parent seems to not have any time for you and they're spending some much time with your new baby brother. Growing pains. All families and in our case our product family experience it to some degree. I think as WP7 matures we'll see the team figuring out how to give everyone the right amount of attention. While we're talking about some of our growing pains, it is also important to note (although not really an excuse) that the Xbox LIVE Arcade developers complain about many of the same things that we do. If you paid attention to talks and information coming out of GDC 2011, most of the the XBLA guys were saying things that sounded eerily similar to what the XBLIG developers are saying (Scott Nichols from GayGamer.net noticed http://twitter.com/#!/NaviFairyGG/status/43540379206811650). Does this mean we should just accept the status quo since we're being treated exactly the same? No way. However it DOES show that the way we're being treated is no indication of the stability and future of the platform, it's just Microsoft dropping the communication ball on two playing fields. We're not alone and we're not even being treated worse. Not great, but also in a weird way a very good sign. Now on to a few tidbits I think I CAN share from the summit (I'm really crossing my fingers I'm not stepping over some NDA line I shouldn't be). First, I discovered that the XBLIG user base is bigger than I personally had originally estimated. I won't give the exact numbers (although we did beg Microsoft to release some of these numbers so maybe someday?) but it was much larger than my original guestimates and I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe some of you guys had the right number when you were guessing, but I know that mine was much too low. And even MORE importantly the number of users/shoppers is growing at a steady pace as well. Our market is growing! That was fantastic news and really something that I had to share. On to the community manager discussion. It was mentioned. I was mentioned. I blushed. Nothing more to report there than the blush in my cheeks was a light crimson color. If I ever see a job description posted for that position I have a resume waiting in the wings. I can't deny that I think that would be my dream job... ...so after I finished blushing, the MVPs did make it very, very clear that the communication has to improve. Community manager or not the single biggest pain point with the Xbox LIVE Indie Game community has been a lack of communication. I have seen dramatic improvement in the team responding to MVPs and I'm even seeing more communication from them on the forums so I'm hoping that's a long term change. I really think they understood the issue, the problem remains how to open that communication channel in a way that was sustainable. I think they'll get it figured out and hopefully that's sooner rather than later. During the summit, you may have seen me tweeting about how I was "that guy" (http://twitter.com/#!/clingermangw/status/42740432471470081). You also may have noticed that Andy and Catalin both mentioned me in their summit write ups. I may have come on a bit strong while I was there...went a little out of character for myself. I've been agitated for a while with the way things have been and I've been listening to you guys and hearing you guys be agitated. I'm also watching some really awesome indie game developers looking elsewhere and leaving the platform. Some of them we might not have been able to keep even with changes, but others are only leaving because of perceptions and lack of communication from Microsoft. And that pisses me off. And I let Microsoft know that I was pissed off. You made your list and I took that list and verbalized it. I verbalized the hell out of it. [It was actually mentioned that I'm a lot nicer on the forums and in email than I am in person...I felt bad about that, but I couldn't stay silent]. Hopefully it did something guys, I really did try hard to get the message across. Along with my agitation, I also brought some pride. I mentioned several things in person to the team that I was particularly proud of. From people in the community that are doing an awesome job, to the re-launch of XboxIndies that was going on that week and even gamers like Steven Hurdle (http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/) who have purchased one XBLIG every day for over 100 days now. The community is freaking rocking it and I made sure to highlight that. So in conclusion, I'd just like to say hang in there (you know, like that picture of the cat). If you've been worried about investing in Xbox LIVE Indie Games because you think it's on shaky ground. It's not. Dream Build Play being about the Xbox 360 should have helped a little to point that out. The team is really scrambling around trying to figure things out and make improvements all around. There’s quite a few new gals and guys and it's going to take them time to catch up and there are a lot of constantly shifting priorities. We all have one toy, one team and we're fighting for time with it. It's also time for the community to continue spreading our wings and going out on our own more often. The Indie Game Winter Uprising was a fantastic example of that. We took things into our own hands and it got noticed and Microsoft got behind it. They do every time we stand up and do something (look at how many Microsoft employees tweeted, wrote about the re-launch of XboxIndies.com or the support I've gotten from them for my weekly XNA Notes). XNA is here to stay, it's time for us to stop being scared of that and figure out how to make our own games the successes they should be. There's definitely a list of things that need to be fixed, things that should be improved and I think we should definitely keep vocal about that with Microsoft. Keep it short, focused and prioritized. There's also a lot of things we can do ourselves while we're waiting on them to fix and change things. Lots of ways we can compensate for particular weaknesses in the channel. The kind of stuff that we can step up and do ourselves. Do it on our own, you know, the way Indies always do. And I'm really looking forward to watching us do just that.

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• Will Python 3.0's backwards-incompatibility affect adoption?

  - by George Stocker

  I visited Slashdot this morning to find out that Python 3.0 has been released. I know C# and Perl, but have wanted to learn Python for some time, especially after I saw its ease of use to create useful tools, not to mention its use in game scripting. My question is, how does the intentionally backwards-incompatible release of Python 3.0 affect adoption, and should I learn Python 2? Or should I take the dive and learn Python 3.0 first, and wait for the libraries to be ported?

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• XNA Notes 008

  - by George Clingerman

  This week has been a rough one. I’ve been sick and then in some kind of slump for my afternoon coding sessions. It could be from the cold, could be I’m still tired from writing that Windows Phone 7 game development book (which is out now!) or it could just be I’m tired of winter and want some sunshine. All I know is that even while I’m stick, the XNA world keeps going along at it’s whirlwind pace. Below are the things I caught in between my coughing fits.. Time Critical XNA News: The 2011 MVP summit is almost here so pass along your feelings and thoughts so the MVPs can take them and share them with the team in person http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76317/464136.aspx#464136 Dream Build Play - there’s no new announcement yet, but you can’t get much more to the end of February than this! http://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx XNA Team: Dean Johnson from the XNA team shares an excellent way of handling Guide.IsTrialMode on WP7 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dejohn/archive/2011/02/21/calling-guide-istrialmode-on-windows-phone-7.aspx Nick Gravelyn tries a new tactic in deciding if there’s enough interest to develop a sequel or not. Don’t YOU want Pixel Man 2 to come out? http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn finally shares what he’s been secretly working on these past 4 months http://twitter.com/#!/The_Zman/status/40590269392887808 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg8Z0ZdYbvg&feature=youtu.be Joel Martinez lets developers around NYC know they should by signing up for Game Hack Day http://twitter.com/joelmartinez/statuses/41118590862102528 http://gamehackday.org/71fdk XNA Developers: Michael McLaughlin shares an XNA RenderTarget2D Sample http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/18/xna-rendertarget2d-sample.aspx Martin Caine starts a new series on Deferred Rendering in XNA 4.0 http://twitter.com/#!/MartinCaine/status/39735221339291648 http://martincaine.com/xna/deferred_rendering_in_xna_4_introduction ElemenyCy posts about his fun time with the IntermediateSerializer http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/xna/holy-bloated-xml-batman/ Ben Kane releases a narrated dev diary video for Project Splice. Let him know if you’d like to see more! (I know I do!) http://twitter.com/#!/benkane/status/39846959498002432 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EmziXZUo08&feature=youtu.be Jason Swearingen (of Novaleaf) posts his part 1 of Spatial Partitioning solutions http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/02/21/spatial-partitioning-part-1-survey-of-spatial-partitioning-solutions/ Brian Lawson of Dark Flow Studios shares what his been up to lately with lots of pretty screenshots and hints of announcements from Microsoft... http://www.darkflowstudios.com/entry/short-and-sweet-part-1 Luke Avery starts a new blog where he plans on making XNA tutorials for beginners (and he’s got a few started already!) http://programmingwithovery.wordpress.com/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): GameMarx Episode 10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/24/ep-10-february-18-2010.aspx Minecraft clone FortressCraft coming to XBLIG http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-23-minecraft-clone-fortresscraft-hits-xblig ezMuze+ starts an IndieGoGo fundraiser campaign to help fund their second game and get it onto even more devices! http://www.indiegogo.com/ezmuze Gamergeddon XBLIG round up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/20/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-20th/?utm_campaign=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter JForce Games loses their Ego http://jforcegames.com/blog/index.php?itemid=121&catid=4 XNA Game Development: @BallerIndustry reminds all XNA developers that the Maths are important ;) http://twitter.com/#!/BallerIndustry/status/39317618280243200 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjV3XDFsjP4&feature=player_embedded#at=106 @suhinini stumbles on an older but extremely useful post on XNA Content Pipeline debugging http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/39270189476352000 http://badcorporatelogo.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/xna-content-pipeline-debugging-4-0/ XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://innovativesingapore.com/2011/02/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities/ Indiefreaks announces that IGF v0.3 is out with Xbox 360 support, SunBurn 2.0.12 and it’s now Open Source! http://twitter.com/#!/indiefreaks/status/39391953971982336 @liotral announces a new series on properly designing a game http://twitter.com/#!/liortal53/status/39466905081217024 http://liortalblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/hello-cosmos/ Indies and XNA at CodeStock 2011 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/20/indies-and-xna-at-codestock-2011.aspx Train Frontier Express posts about XNA Content Hotloading http://trainfrontierexpress.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-content-hotloading-overview.html Slyprid announces a new character editor in Transmute http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/40146992818696192 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhFAc78LDs&feature=youtu.be The XNA 2D from the ground up tutorial series http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/23/recap-the-xna-2d-from-the-ground-up-tutorial-series.aspx Sgt.Conker posts a “Clingerman” (hey that’s me!) to stay relevant http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/posting-a-clingerman-to-stay-relevant/

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• Cocos2d-x Spritebatch node animation appears to be broken? cocos2d-x 2.0.3

  - by George Host

  Hi I have spent aprox 2 days trying to get this to work doing a google searches left and right and I did get it working except for sprite batch nodes. So in my class I am able to load kuwalio_stand.png and I tested kuwalio_walk1.png and 2 and 3 from the FrameCache(). They work for sure 100%. I run this code and it does not animate does anyone else have the same issue with sprite batch nodes? cocos2d::CCSprite * player = Player::create(); player->setPosition(cocos2d::CCPointMake(0.0f,0.0f)); player->setDisplayFrame(cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_stand.png")); player->setTag(PlayerTag); cocos2d::CCAnimation * walk = cocos2d::CCAnimation::create(); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk1 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk1"); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk2 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk2"); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk3 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk3"); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk1); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk2); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk3); cocos2d::CCAnimate * actionWalk = cocos2d::CCAnimate::create(walk); cocos2d::CCRepeatForever * actionRepeat = cocos2d::CCRepeatForever::create(actionWalk); walk->setDelayPerUnit(0.1f); actionWalk->setDuration(10.1f); this->runAction(actionRepeat); // Change camera to a soft follow camera. this->runAction(cocos2d::CCFollow::create(player)); mSceneSpriteBatchNode->addChild(player); // Have the CCNode object run its virtual update function as fast as possible. // Every frame for this layer. this-scheduleUpdate(); Counter example without the sprite batch node... cocos2d::CCSprite * sprite = cocos2d::CCSprite::create("kuwalio_walk1.png"); this->addChild(sprite,0); sprite->setPosition(cocos2d::CCPointMake(60,60)); sprite->retain(); cocos2d::CCAnimation * actionAnimation = cocos2d::CCAnimation::create(); actionAnimation->setDelayPerUnit(0.01f); actionAnimation->retain(); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk1.png"); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk2.png"); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk3.png"); cocos2d::CCAnimate * a = cocos2d::CCAnimate::create(actionAnimation); a->setDuration(0.10f); cocos2d::CCRepeatForever * actionRepeat = cocos2d::CCRepeatForever::create(a); sprite->runAction(actionRepeat);

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• XNA Notes 010

  - by George Clingerman

  With GDC 2011 wrapping up there were a LOT of great interviews and posts with and about XNA and XBLIG and some of our more notorious developers. Definitely worth spending many, many hours watching, listening and reading all those. Very inspiring! Also, don’t forget to get signed up for Dream Build Play! And just as an early warning reminder do NOT, I repeat do NOT wait to submit your game the last day. There are major issues submitting the last day every year and you do not want all your hard work to be hanging on whether your entry actually went through in that last day. Plan on submitting a few days if not a week before. I’m serious, you’ll thank yourself later! Now on to what’s happening in the XNA community! Time Critical XNA News: PAX East Meet Up (really wish I was going!) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71921/439262.aspx Want to stay panicked about the countdown to Dream Build Play? Mike McLaughlin shares his DBP countdown clock http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/44454458960252928 XNA Team: Nick Gravelyn Only needs less than 600 new users in his unique marketing plan for Pixel Man 2 http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ And hares his ad revenue numbers with his XNA WP7 games http://theoneswiththelight.com/2011/my-results-with-ad-revenue-for-wp7-games/ XNA MVPs: Andy “The ZMan” Dunn posts his 15,000th App Hub forum post and shares a few thoughts on the MVP summit http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx Chris Williams shares his thoughts on the MVP summit http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx XNA Developers: Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best games Wraps up GDC http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/gdc-2011-wrapped.html And shares the wonderful screenshots from Serious Sam. (I’m so jealous people at PAX East willl be playing a demo of this game!) http://mommysbest.blogspot.com/2011/03/serious-sam-double-d.html James Silva of Ska Studios announces http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/09/vampire-smile-at-hotel-sierra/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/08/vengeance-begins-april-6th/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/04/good-morning-gato-52/ Michael McLaughlin writes an extremely useful set of tips for XNA WP7 developers http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/10/tips-for-xna-wp7-developers.aspx Robert Boyd “the one man XBLIG improving machine” posts his 9 tips for marketing an Xbox LIVE Indie Gam http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110309/7183/9_Tips_for_XBLIG_Marketing.php http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/77534/470586.aspx#470586 And shares his day by day experience at GDC this year http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7118/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_1.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110301/7123/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_2.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110303/7129/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7133/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_4.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RobertBoyd/20110307/7160/GDC_Saves_the_World__Impressions_Day_5.php Phillipe Da Silva releases new IGF Pong Sample preview http://www.vimeo.com/20904070 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Gamergeddon posts XBox Indie Game Roundup for March 6th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/03/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-march-6th/ Dealspwn interviews FortressCraft developer Projector Games http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-minecraft-clones-venting-haters-part-1/ http://www.dealspwn.com/fortresscraft-developer-interview-part-2-trials-tribulations-indie-development/ Writings of Mass Destruction continues the Xbox LIVE Indie Game a day campaign, here’s his take on FishCraft (be sure to check out his other posts!) http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/03/05/day-116-fishcraft/ Tom Ogburn shares his GDC notes on the XBLIG panel jotted quickly while attending the panel http://twitter.com/#!/TOgburn/status/44454191028125696 http://www.starlitskygames.com/blogs/site_news/archive/2011/03/06/802.aspx Dave Voyles of Armless Octopus has crazy good coverage on XNA and Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers at GDC 2011. Interviews and articles all extremely well done! http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/06/gdc-2011-successful-indie-developers-share-insight-on-microsofts-self-publishing-service/ There’s honestly so many posts and interviews you should just hit his front page and scroll down through all of the latest ones. http://www.armlessoctopus.com/ GameMarx Episode 12 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/27/ep-12-march-4-2011.aspx B.U.T.T.O.N now on Steam! http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/03/button_party_game_now_on_steam.php German Xbox Dashboard gets review program from GamePro http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/07/gamepo-indie-review-show-debuts-on-german-xbox-dashboard/ XboxIndies.com (one of the best XNA sites out there at this point!) continues to add review sites to it’s main review feed. (And don’t forget to play with that awesome XBLIG pivot control!) http://xboxindies.com/ Kris Steele of FunInfused Games shares early footage of his game World of Chalk http://twitter.com/#!/kriswd40/status/45007114371989504 Raymond Matthews of Darkstarmatryx reviews FunInfused Games Abduction Action http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=264 TheVideoGamerRob reviews Zombie Football Carnage http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/xblig-review-zombie-football-carnage/ XBLIG Square Off Making the Jump to WP7 http://www.wp7connect.com/2011/03/08/xblig-square-off-will-make-the-jump-to-windows-phone/ Mommy’s Best Games making the news round with their Serious Sam announcement http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/09/serious-sam-gets-serious-indie-cred-with-new-indie-series/ Most quoted and linked XBLIG article of the week with the least amount of actual facts and reporting. Shared only because it makes me sad that this is the best coverage we get. (Hey reporters, there’s LOT and LOTS of XBLIG and XNA experts you can contact if you need to check up on facts or wonder why on questions like, Why can’t XBLIGs have Nazis? There’s actually a real answer for that..) http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/06/xblig-facts-nazi-killing-a-no-no-revenue-a-yes-yes/ XNA Development: Mort8088 has been in an XNA tutorial writing frenzy releasing 4 XNA 4.0 entry level tutorials this week! http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-0-intro/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-1-fonts/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-2-sprites/ http://mort8088.com/2011/03/06/xna-4-0-tutorial-3-input-from-keyboard/ Interesting discussion on what it means to be a community (you do have to sign up to be a member of the XNA UK forums to read it...) http://twitter.com/#!/XNAUK/status/44705269254594560 Slyprid continues his incredible pace on Transmute and shares screens of his new Animation Builder http://twitter.com/#!/slyprid/status/45169271847911424 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/ Philippe Da Silva wants to know who is using IGF for their games. If it’s you, drop him a note letting him know! http://twitter.com/#!/philippedasilva/status/44325893719588864 New Sunburn Video Tutorials released http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/fivesidedbarrel/archive/2011/03/07/new-documentation-video-tutorials.aspx Loading and rendering animated collada models using XNA 4.0 http://bunkernetz.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/loading-and-rendering-animated-collada-models-using-xna-4-0/ XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 6 Accelerometer Input http://buzzgamesnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/xna-for-silverlight-developers-part-6.html

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• XNA Notes 004

  - by George Clingerman

  The XNA community has been crazy busy again. It always make me fee like such a slacker collecting all of these notes as I see the tremendous output from people all over the world and it’s incredible and humbling. There are some amazingly skilled people working with XNA. On another not, I’m going to take a minute to get on my soapbox and say, if you are developing ANYTHING and are not using some sort of source/revision control, START IMMEDIATELY. This applies to teams of one. Projects for fun. And “I back up my hard drive” or “I use dropbox!” does NOT count as using source control. You’ll be doing yourself a HUGE favor if you find one, learn to use it and integrate it into your everyday workflow. I personally use Subversion. It’s hosted offsite at xp.dev.com and I use TortoiseSVN as my front end to interface with the repository. It’s simple and easy to use and has saved me from myself so many time. Honestly, get setup with some type of source control immediately. If you don’t understand how, grab another developer that does and have them walk you through setup and the basics of using it. Ok, I’m done. On to the notes… The XNA Team Only 14 days left to Submit XNA GS 3.1 Games! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/24/14-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-on-app-hub.aspx Shawn Hargreaves shares some great information on Exception Handling best practices on the XNA forums http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73333/448556.aspx#448556 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions.aspx XNA MVPs @CatalinZima gives us a peek at Chicken’s Can’t Fly http://www.amusedsloth.com/games/chickens-cant-fly/ Screen-space deformations in XNA for WP7 from Catalin Zima http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/30313083767357440 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ XNA Developers Going to GDC? Don’t miss the XNA panel hosted by a plethora of well known XNA community names! http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73576/448842.aspx#448842 MasterBlud does an interview with @Xalterax http://twitter.com/MasterBlud/statuses/28510774812999680 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7102 Luke Schneider of Radiangames posts about The Radiangames Style http://radiangames.com/?p=532 Holmade Games had a “vote for the new playable character” poll going on for Hurdle Turtle this past week http://holmadegames.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-level-pack-vote-for-your-favorite.html IGF v0.1.0.0 release post mortem http://indiefreaks.com/2011/01/24/v0-1-0-0-release-post-mortem/ James an Super Dunner post Good Morning Gato #46 and a look at the Vampire Smile box art http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/21/good-morning-gato-46/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/01/20/vampire-smiles-digital-box-art/ Alfredo Di Napoli creates Cow Pong using XNA and F#! http://alfredodinapoli.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/cow-pong-a-simple-xna-game-in-f/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games Signed In Podcast posts Episode #61 http://www.signedinpodcast.com/?p=559 Gamergeddon posts the January 23rd edition of XBLIG Round Up http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/01/23/xbox-indie-games-round-up-january-23rd/ Indie Asylum posts Antipole Review http://www.indieasylum.com/reviews/38-xblig/112-antipole.html 1UPOrPosion Reviews OSR Unhinged http://www.1uporpoison.com/xblig/osr-unhinged/ DarkstarMatryx review Warbirds at Work http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=185 Review of Aban Hawkins and the 1000 Spikes http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/24/xbox-indie-review-aban-hawkins-the-1000-spikes/ XboxHornet reviews Corrupted http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/?p=7123 XBLIG 2010: The Best And The Worst http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamieMann/20110121/6840/ Xbox LIVE Arcade Sales Analysis - an interesting read for XBLIG developers wondering how they’re doing compared to arcade.. http://www.gamerbytes.com/2011/01/xbla_sales_analysis_dec_2010.php Best of Indies for January 25th http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/games/best-of-the-indies-25th-january-2011 Decimation X3 appears as an arcade machine in the wild! http://twitter.com/mdoucette/statuses/29605562484260864 XNA Game Development Guiseppe De Francesco (@PinoEire) announced Torque X 4.0 CEV is now in RC phase! http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20779 DrMistry of mstargames shares his struggle (and mistakes) with learning to use the Content Pipeline http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/181-pontent-cipeline-more-like-it.html New Tutorial posted XNA 2D Basic Collision Detection with Rotation from Ioannis Panagopoulos http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-2D-Basic-Collision-Detection-with-Rotation.aspx Sgt. Conker roars to life! Doing a much better (and prettier) job of collecting XNA news from around the interwebs. http://www.sgtconker.com/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/dedication-for-captain-boki/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/screen-space-deformations-in-xna-for-windows-phone-7/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/xna-4-0-light-pre-pass-2/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/01/indiefreaks-game-framework-0-1-0-0-released/ Offering a little free publicity for XBLIGs http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/73465/448321.aspx#448321 Ben Kane writes about building loot tables from Excel using the Content Pipeline http://benkane.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/building-loot-tables-from-excel-using-the-content-pipeline/ Good tips on attracting a game artist AND an offer to create your cover art for FREE http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/72998.aspx If you’re an XBLIG developer keeping your eye on places to release on the PC, might want to be watching the IndieCity blog. Seems like these guys are well on their way to constructing something worth watching. http://www.indiecity.com/blog/ DVMGames spotted a new crowd-funding site for Indies http://twitter.com/DVMGames/statuses/29947274767372289 http://www.8bitfunding.com/ Transmute continues to make progress and there’s a nice dev blog to follow along here http://forgottenstarstudios.com/blog/

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• Entity is currently read-only

  - by George Evjen

  Quick post on an issue that we were having today. This fix may just be a band-aid for another issue but this fix at least got us moving again today. Since I didn’t see anything concrete online for a solution I figured I would post this as a part one fix and then post a more detailed fix later. We were getting this error earlier today in one of our projects that uses EF and WCF Ria Services. This entity is currently read-only. One of the following conditions exist: a custom method has been invoked, a submit operation is in progress, or edit operations are not supported for the entity type. The work around that we used for this is to simply do a check to see if the property is read only. Each entity has that property on it. private void SelectedInstitution_PropertyChanged(object sender, System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e)        {            if (!_personDetailContext.CurrentPerson.IsReadOnly)            {                _personDetailContext.CurrentPerson.LastUpdatedDate = DateTime.Now;            }        } We check to see if the CurrentPerson in this situation is readonly. If its not read only we go ahead and execute some other code. Again, this got us moving today, I am sure this is just step one in resolving this issue.

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• Antenna Aligner Part 8: It’s Alive!!!

  - by Chris George

  Finally the day has come, Antenna Aligner v1.0.1 has been uploaded to the AppStore and . “Waiting for review” .. . fast forward 7 days and much checking of emails later WOO HOO! Now what? So I set my facebook page to go live  https://www.facebook.com/AntennaAligner, and started by sending messages to my mates that have iphones! Amazingly a few of them bought it! Similarly some of my colleagues were also kind enough to support me and downloaded it too! Unfortunately the only way I knew they had bought is was from them telling me, as the iTunes connect data is only updated daily at about midday GMT. This is a shame, surely they could provide more granular updates throughout the day? Although I suppose once an app has been out in the wild for a while, daily updates are enough. It would, however, be nice to get a ping when you make your first sale! I would have expected more feedback on my facebook page as well, maybe I’m just expecting too much, or perhaps I’ve configured the page wrong. The new facebook timeline layout is just confusing, and I’m not sure it’s all public, I’ll check that! So please take a look and see what you think! I would love to get some more feedback/reviews/suggestions… Oh and watch out for the Android version coming soon!

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• Spritebatch node animation appears to be broken in cocos2d-x 2.0.3

  - by George Host

  Hi I have spent aprox 2 days trying to get this to work doing a google searches left and right and I did get it working except for sprite batch nodes. So in my class I am able to load kuwalio_stand.png and I tested kuwalio_walk1.png and 2 and 3 from the FrameCache(). They work for sure 100%. I run this code and it does not animate does anyone else have the same issue with sprite batch nodes? cocos2d::CCSprite * player = Player::create(); player->setPosition(cocos2d::CCPointMake(0.0f,0.0f)); player->setDisplayFrame(cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_stand.png")); player->setTag(PlayerTag); cocos2d::CCAnimation * walk = cocos2d::CCAnimation::create(); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk1 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk1.png"); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk2 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk2.png"); cocos2d::CCSpriteFrame * walk3 = cocos2d::CCSpriteFrameCache::sharedSpriteFrameCache()->spriteFrameByName("kuwalio_walk3.png"); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk1); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk2); walk->addSpriteFrame(walk3); cocos2d::CCAnimate * actionWalk = cocos2d::CCAnimate::create(walk); cocos2d::CCRepeatForever * actionRepeat = cocos2d::CCRepeatForever::create(actionWalk); walk->setDelayPerUnit(0.1f); actionWalk->setDuration(10.1f); player->runAction(actionRepeat); // Change camera to a soft follow camera. this->runAction(cocos2d::CCFollow::create(player)); mSceneSpriteBatchNode->addChild(player); // Have the CCNode object run its virtual update function as fast as possible. // Every frame for this layer. this-scheduleUpdate(); Counter example without the sprite batch node... cocos2d::CCSprite * sprite = cocos2d::CCSprite::create("kuwalio_walk1.png"); this->addChild(sprite,0); sprite->setPosition(cocos2d::CCPointMake(60,60)); sprite->retain(); cocos2d::CCAnimation * actionAnimation = cocos2d::CCAnimation::create(); actionAnimation->setDelayPerUnit(0.01f); actionAnimation->retain(); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk1.png"); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk2.png"); actionAnimation->addSpriteFrameWithFileName("kuwalio_walk3.png"); cocos2d::CCAnimate * a = cocos2d::CCAnimate::create(actionAnimation); a->setDuration(0.10f); cocos2d::CCRepeatForever * actionRepeat = cocos2d::CCRepeatForever::create(a); sprite->runAction(actionRepeat);

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• How come many project-hosting sites doesn't have a forum feature?

  - by george

  I'm considering starting an open-source project, so I shopped around some popular project hosting sites. What I find surprising is that many (see here for a nice feature table) of the popular project hosting sites (e.g. GitHub, BitBucket) don't have a forum feature, i.e. a place where users can talk to the devs, ask questions, raise ideas, etc. IMHO an active forum is an important factor in creating a user community around a project, so I would expect that most project owners would be interested in such a feature. I've also noticed that some projects do have support forums (or mailing lists) hosted elsewhere - e.g. Ruby on Rails is hosted on GitHub but has a Google Groups support group, and TortoiseHG is hosted on BitBucket but has a mailing list on SourceForge - so it's not like this feature is unneeded. So how come many project hosting sites don't have a forum feature?

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• Lost website rankings as a result of using a 302 redirect instead of a 301

  - by george peris

  I have an online store and during the last 2 days I noticed a big change in its SERPS for some keywords. The site is indexed in local Google for 5 keywords, and the online store is based on Magento 1.7. 5 days ago, I set up an SSL certificate in the online store in order to get better ranking results. I setup the SSL and followed the instructions from the Magento to make permanent 301 redirects from the HTTP URLs to the HTTPS URLs. I replaced all the URLs of the online store with HTTPS. When I saw in the SERPS that the rankings for some keywords were going up and down, I checked some URLs to see if all was going well with 301 redirects and found that the redirects where 302 and not 301, which is a big bug caused by Magento. I solved the problem with the .htaccess, but still the rankings for the homepage have disappeared. I fetched the site again using Google Webmaster Tools and am waiting to see. Can you please advise if I did something wrong, and what else I could do?

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• Antenna Aligner Part 10: Updates and emails…

  - by Chris George

  Since my last post back in July, I’ve not done huge amounts of work on my app for two reasons. Firstly, no time! Secondly, I wanted to leave it out in the wild for a while and see what happened. Well, what happened?  over 1,300 users, that’s what’s happened!  This uptake is beyond my wildest expectations, and apart from a couple of issues that I’ll mention in a minute, most of the feedback has been very positive indeed! I’ve had several emails giving me feedback and reporting issues, all of which I have made a point of replying to immediately. This act alone has met with favourable replies! One of the main issues was with iPad. So it turns out that my app is only accurate in portrait mode. Turning it into landscape will offset the direction by +-90degrees! Whoops! I think I’ve fixed this by disabling the orientation switching, but I have not yet had an iPad to test this on. I had several emails from iPod Touch users claiming the app did not work for them. Specifically, the compass view did not work. On investigation, it turns out that the iPod Touch does not have the compass hardware required to do this. Unfortunately there is no way to exclude iPod Touch’s from the list of supported devices, so I’ve just had to make it very clear in the itunes description that the device is not fully supported.  You can still get the list of transmitters, but you then have to use a real compass to get the bearing. But that’s not the end of the world. Several customers have requested the aerial polarisation to be displayed in the app. I was already working on this, and the data was already there, it was just a case of displaying this in the UI. I have a solution now, and this will be in the next release. Of course, with the Digital switchover in full swing across the UK, there have been one set of data updates (in 1.0.3), and another is due shortly. This reflects the transmitters as they switch over the digital fully and their power output increased. So all in all I’m very pleased with the feedback I’ve had, and I’m looking to get the next release out there by early December (allowing for the 2-3 week Apple approval lag!)  

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• XNA Notes 002

  - by George Clingerman

  This past week (much like every week in the XNA community) was filled with things happening and people doing cool things (and getting noticed for doing cool things!). You can definitely tell there are some Xbox LIVE Indie game developers starting to make some names for themselves. Can’t wait to name drop them at bars. Me- “Oh you played Game X? Yeah, I know the guy that made that. Pretty cool guy.” Yeah, I’ll be THAT guy.   Time Critical XNA News 30 days left to submit XBLIGs made in XNA Game Studio 3.1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/01/08/30-days-left-to-submit-xna-gs-3-1-games-to-app-hub.aspx Jeromy Walsh wants you to know his XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop starting soon, go get signed up! And the forum is now LIVE on GameDev.net http://gamedevelopedia.com/ http://tinyurl.com/4gg2cfv The XNA Team Per Nick Gravelyn, Aaron Stebner’s blog post is a must read for icons on Windows Phone http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72022/439597.aspx#439597 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/10/01/10070507.aspx Shawn Hargreaves writes about Sprite Billboards in a 3D world http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/01/12/spritebatch-billboards-in-a-3d-world.aspx XNA MVPs Andy “The ZMan” Dunn wants YOU to come to the MVP Summit and run a 5K http://www.indiegameguy.com/blogs/zman/archive/2010/12/26/come-to-the-mvp-summit-and-run-a-5k-yes-you.aspx Jim Perry updates his forum signature just to make it clear that he’s not speaking for Microsoft or giving official information (LOL, thanks Jim, now if only people will take the time to read that...) XNA MVP | Please use the Forum Search and read the Forum FAQs | My posts are not official info http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/70849/439613.aspx#439613 XNA Developers Robert Boyd (@werezombie) working hard at converting his RPG engine used to make Breath of Death VII and Chtulu Saves the World to XNA 4.0. If you haven’t done the upgrade yet yourself, might be useful to read back through his tweets and recent forum posts to see the problems/solutions he’s encountered. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/71834/438099.aspx#438099 http://www.twitter.com/werezompire SpynDoctorGames is in the final phase before the release of Your Doodles are Bugged for the PC! Going to be interesting to watch as more XNA game developers explore the PC game market for their games. http://twitter.com/SpynDoctorGames/statuses/24503173217521664 http://www.spyn-doctor.de @DrMistry shares some details of his next title YoYoYo http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/35-genblog/177-a-new-year-a-new-game-and-maybe-a-new-approach.html Travis Woodward (@RabidLionGames) has a blog post coming this weekend on Farseer and Mario-like platformer movement. http://twitter.com/RabidLionGames/statuses/24992762021548032 http://www.rabidlion.com/ S4G Interview with Radiangames http://n4g.com/news/679492/s4g-interview-with-radiangames XBLAratings.com interviews Steve Flores (@DragonDivide) developer of Alpha Squad http://www.xblaratings.com/developer-qaa/3621-alpha-squad-developer-interview XBox LIVE Indie Games If you haven’t been reading the roundups on IndieGames by NaviFairy on GayGamer, you’ve been missing out! http://gaygamer.net/2011/01/xbox_indie_review_roundup_1112.html Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 1 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/10/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-part-1/ Armless Octopus posts the Top 20 Games of 2010 Part 2 http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/01/12/top-20-xbox-live-indie-games-of-2010-%E2%80%93-part-2/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews http://www.gamemarx.com/ Don’t forget to be following @XboxHornet . That’s a great way to snag free copies of Xbox LIVE Indie Games http://twitter.com/XboxHornet/statuses/24471103808208896 http://www.xboxhornet.com/wordpress/ Xbox LIVE Indie Game Review posts the top 20 Xbox 360 LIVE Indie Games of 2010 http://www.xbox-360-community-games-reviews.com/top-20-best-xbox-360-live-indie-games-of-2010/ VVGtv to Stream #XBLIG Again! Help out if you can. http://vvgtv.com/2011/01/07/vvgtv-to-stream-xblig-again/ Indie Gamer Magazine Issue 14 has a look at the Xbox LIVE Winter Indie Game Uprisiing http://www.indiegamemag.com/issue14/ XNA Game Development Andrew Russell announced and asked for help in his development of ExEn: XNA for iPhone, Android and Silverlight http://rockethub.com/projects/752-exen-xna-for-iphone-android-and-silverlight App Hub forums letting you down? Don’t forget about StackOverflow and the game development specific version gamedev.stackexchange http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/xna http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/xna Transmute gets an update from Aaron Foley (@slyprid) and you can now add and visually edit parallax layers to your 2D tile game. http://twitpic.com/3nudj0 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/23418379574448128 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/Transmute/default.html Webcomics Weekly #75 touches on some feelings I’ve seen people try to express (myself included) when talking about game development and what types of games should be released for XBLIG http://www.pvponline.com/2011/01/05/webcomics-weekly-75-sour-oats/ Setting up a new PC for XNA development? Here’s a site that helps you quickly build a installer for all the most common applications developers use. http://ninite.com/ Fun wew thread on the XNA forums asking XBLIG/XNA developers just what their Top 10 favorite video games of all time are. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/107.aspx Christopher Hill (@Xalterax) stumbled across an entire community that does nothing but create box art. This is a great potential resource for Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers to get some awesome box art for their games. http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/46582/441451.aspx#441451 http://www.vgboxart.com/browse/plat/360/ Don’t forget about the XNA Wiki, fantastic community resource (and roll up those sleeves and contribute already!) http://xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

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• What are some useful things you can do with Mvc Modelbinders?

  - by George Mauer

  It occurs to me that the ModelBinder mechanism in ASP MVC public interface IModelBinder { object BindModel(System.Web.Mvc.ControllerContext controllerContext, System.Web.Mvc.ModelBindingContext bindingContext); } Is insanely powerful. What are some cool uses of this mechanism that you've done/seen? I guess since the concept is similar in other frameworks there's no reason to limit it to Asp Mvc

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• VLC will sometimes have issues displaying video in fullscreen. What could cause this? How would I troubleshoot the issue?

  - by George Marian

  Recently VLC has been having issues displaying video in fullscreen mode. AFAIK, nothing has changed with the video card drivers and it's certainly the same version of VLC. (/me shakes a fist at the repository maintainers) This has worked without issue in the past. In fact, I've had as many as 6 instances of VLC running, each playing a video. One was always fullscreen on my second monitor, while the others were tiled on my primary monitor. I was able to toggle any of the other 5 into fullscreen mode and the video displayed without issue. Lately, I've been having trouble running 2 instances in fullscreen mode. (Sometimes, even a single instance will not display the video in fullscreen.) VLC will continue to play the video, but in fullscreen mode I see nothing but a black screen. Sometimes, the video will display if I maximize the VLC window. Other times, I have to settle for a smaller sized window. I don't know if this is pertinent, but sometimes changing the min/max state of a Firefox window (Minefield, specifically) seemed to allow the troublesome instance to display the video in fullscreen mode. However, that did not prove to be a consistent workaround. Sometimes, it seemed that closing a Firefox window did the trick, though that isn't consistently successful either. (I futzed with Firefox, because with the crazy number of windows and tabs that I normally have open, it regularly hogs about 1 GB of RAM.) Another bit of funkiness that comes to mind is the fact that my secondary monitor is considered the primary on boot-up. I use xrandr to designate the real 1st monitor as primary after boot-up, as suggested by someone in a question I asked on the Unix & Linux SE site. Specs: Ubuntu 10.10 w/ Gnome and Compiz 8GB RAM AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition Asus M4A79 Deluxe mobo XFX ATI Radeon HD 5750 w/ 1GB RAM VLC is configured to use the hardware overlay for video (as per the default setting) Does anyone have an idea what may cause this issue or how I may go about troubleshooting it? Update: Right now I have 2 instances of VLC playing, each in fullscreen mode on a separate monitor. This is what I see:

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• A Kingdom To Conquer: Character Sketches

  - by George Clingerman

  Still not 100% sold on my title so it remains a working title for now, but here’s a series of character sketches I’ve done for a turn based strategy game I’m playing at making. I’ve been sketching these on various pieces of paper throughout the last two weeks and just finished the last of them today (my plan was for 16 different types of units and well, now I have them, so I consider that done!).                    Pretty rough sketches for now, but I’m pretty happy with the art style overall. I was wrestling for quite a while just HOW I wanted the game to look and then I finally stumbled across Art Baltazar and I was like, THAT’S IT! There’s a few characters I need to re-do a bit more, I feel they’re a bit TOO much like some of the characters that inspired them but I’m happy that the ideas are finally sketched out. I’ve also been playing a bit in InkScape working on making these guys digital. A pretty new experience for me since I’m not used to working with vector images but I think I’ll get the hang of it. Here’s the Knight all vectorized. Now if I could just start making some progress on the actual game itself…

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• MSDN Search Help

  - by George Evjen

  Looks like MSDN has made a change to their search. If you navigate to http://msdn.microsoft.com You will see their search on the top of the page. If you put in a search term, Silverlight DataBinding You will see results that are pulled from the forums of msdn, stackover flow and a few other places. You will also be able to see the number of replies to the thread and the threads that have been answered. Great resource..

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• Reasons to Use a VM For Development

  - by George Stocker

  Background: I work at a start-up company, where one team uses Virtual Machines to connect to a remote server to do their development, and another team (the team I'm on) uses local IIS/SQL Server 2005/Visual Studio installations to conduct work. Team VM is located about 1000 miles from Team Non-VM, and the servers the VMs run off of are located near Team VM (Latency, for those that are wondering, is about 50ms). A person high in the company is pushing for Team Non-VM to use virtual machines for programming, development, and testing. The latter point we agree on -- we want Virtual Machines to test configurations and various aspects of the web application in a 'clean' state. The Problem: What we don't agree on is having developers using RDP to connect to a desktop remotely that contains Visual Studio, SQL Server, and IIS to do the same development we could do locally on our laptops. I've tried the VM set-up, and besides the color issue, there is a latency issue that is rather noticeable, not to mention that since we're a start-up, a good number of employees work from home on occasion with our work laptops, and this move would cut off the laptops. They'd be turned in. Reasons to Use Remote VMs for Development (Not Testing!): Here are the stated reasons that this person wants us to use VMs: They work for TeamVM. They keep the source code "safe". If we want to work from home, we could just use our home PCs. Licenses (I don't know what the argument is, only that it's been used). Reasons not to use Remote VMs for Development: Here are the stated reasons why we don't want to use VMs: We like working from home. We get a lot done on our own time. We're not going to use our Home PCs to do work related stuff. The Latency is noticeable. Support for the VMs (if they go down, or if we need a new VM) takes a while. We don't have administrative privileges on the VM, and are unable to change settings as needed. What I'm looking for from the community is this: What reasons would you give for not using VMs for development? Keep in mind these are remote VMs -- this isn't a VM running on a local desktop. It's using the laptop (or a desktop) as a thin client for a remote VM. Also, on the other side of the coin: Is there something we're missing that makes VMs more palatable for development? Edit: I think 'safe' is used in term of corporate espionage, or more correctly if the Laptop gets stolen, the person who stole would have access to our source code. The former (as we've pointed out, is always going to be a possibility -- companies stop that with litigation, there isn't a technical solution (so far as I can see)). The latter point is ( though I don't know its usefulness in a corporate scenario) mitigated by Truecrypt'ing the entire volume.

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• Tester that doesn't test

  - by George

  What should I do about a tester that does not test? We have a complicated dry run scenario, that takes a lot of time to execute. Mostly this tester will execute it's tests in very slow way...checking emails, internet, etc. He reports just a few bugs, but! Whenever the official dry-run begins (these are logged with testlink) the tester starts to open new bugs that where not discovered before. Is he not doing his job correctly? Or am I just overlooking how tests work? I'm not his supervisor, but he is testing code that I wrote.

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• Game Components, Game Managers and Object Properties

  - by George Duckett

  I'm trying to get my head around component based entity design. My first step was to create various components that could be added to an object. For every component type i had a manager, which would call every component's update function, passing in things like keyboard state etc. as required. The next thing i did was remove the object, and just have each component with an Id. So an object is defined by components having the same Ids. Now, i'm thinking that i don't need a manager for all my components, for example i have a SizeComponent, which just has a Size property). As a result the SizeComponent doesn't have an update method, and the manager's update method does nothing. My first thought was to have an ObjectProperty class which components could query, instead of having them as properties of components. So an object would have a number of ObjectProperty and ObjectComponent. Components would have update logic that queries the object for properties. The manager would manage calling the component's update method. This seems like over-engineering to me, but i don't think i can get rid of the components, because i need a way for the managers to know what objects need what component logic to run (otherwise i'd just remove the component completely and push its update logic into the manager). Is this (having ObjectProperty, ObjectComponent and ComponentManager classes) over-engineering? What would be a good alternative?

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• What do you do when a client requires Rich Text Editing on their website?

  - by George Stocker

  As we all know by now, XSS attacks are dangerous and really easy to pull off. Various frameworks make it easy to encode HTML, like ASP.NET MVC does: <%= Html.Encode("string"); %> But what happens when your client requires that they be able to upload their content directly from a Microsoft Word document? Here's the scenario: People can copy and paste content from Microsoft word into a WYSIWYG editor (in this case tinyMCE), and then that information is posted to a web page. The website is public, but only members of that organization will have access to post information to a webpage. What is the best way to handle this requirement? Currently there is no checking done on what the client posts (since only 'trusted' users can post), but I'm not particularly happy with that and would like to lock it down further in case an account is hacked. The platform in question is ASP.NET MVC. The only conceptual method that I'm aware of that meets these requirements is to whitelist HTML tags and let those pass through. Is there another way? If not, is the best way to let them store it in the Database in any form, but only display it properly encoded and stripped of bad tags? NB: The questions differ in that he only assumes there's one way. I'm also asking the following questions: 1. Is there a better way that doesn't rely on HTML Whitelists? 2. Is there a better way that relies on a different view engine? 3. Is there a WYSIWYG editor that includes the ability to whitelist on the fly? 4. Should I even worry about this since it will only be for 'private posting' (Much in the same way that a private blog allows HTML From the author, but since only he can post, it's not an issue)? Edit #2: If suggesting a WYSIWYG editor, it must be free (as in speech, or as in beer). Update: All of the suggestions thus far revolve around a specific Rich Text Editor to use: Only provide an editor as a suggestion if it allows for sanitization of HTML tags; and it fulfills the requirement of accepting pasted documents from a WYSIWYG Editor like Microsoft Word. There are three methods that I know of: 1. Not allow HTML. 2. Allow HTML, but sanitize it 3. Find a Rich Text Editor that sanitizes and allows HTML. The previous questions remain (1-4 above). Related Question Preventing Cross Site Scripting (XSS)

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• Best Practices and Etiquette for Setting up Email Notifications

  - by George Stocker

  If you were going to set up a Email Alerts for the customers of your website to subscribe to, what rules of etiquette ought to be followed? I can think of a few off the top of my head: Users can Opt-Out Text Only (Or tasteful Remote Images) Not sent out more than once a week Clients have fine-grained control over what they receive emails about (Only receive what they are interested in) What other points should I consider? From a programming standpoint, what is the best method for setting up and running email notifications? Should I use an ASP.NET Service? A Windows Service? What are the pitfalls to either? How should I log emails that are sent? I don't care if they're received, but I do need to be able to prove that I did or did not send an email.

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• Tell me what&rsquo;s wrong! &ndash; An XNA sample demonstrating exception handling and reporting in

  - by George Clingerman

  I’ve always enjoyed using Nick Gravelyn’s exception handling in all of my games. You’re always going to encounter those unhandled exception that your players are going to ferret out and having a method to display them rather than just crashing to the dashboard is definitely more of an elegant solution. But the other day I got to thinking…what if we could do more? What if instead of just displaying the error, we could encourage the players to send us the error. So I started playing with that an expanding upon Nick’s sample code to see what I could come up with. I got close to what I envisioned, but unfortunately there were some limitations to just what the XNA API could do. In my head I was picturing the players hitting “Send Message” and a 360 message would just be sent to the XBLIG developer. Unfortunately, you can only send messages in an XNA game to someone you’re currently in a network session with. Since I didn’t want to have a 360 server running all the time, virally connecting to players just to get error messages, I did the next best thing and just open up a 360 message and encourage them to manually enter the gamertag. Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that a little better, but this works for now. In the sample, players can hit the “A” button or key to generate in an exception. If the debugger is not attached, then the Exception message screen will be shown explaining what has happened and giving the player a chance to send a 360 message to the gamertag provided or maybe even just send an email. Nick’s code has been changed just a bit. It now accepts any PlayerIndex (no longer hard coded to just PlayerIndex.One) and it no longer uses a MessageBox to get the users selection. The code has also been modified so that it works both for the 360 and for the PC. Check out “Tell me what’s wrong!” and let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions. I really do appreciate the feedback.

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