Now i have achieved to get transparency both on models and modelmeshes , so if the model has transparent meshes in it they are also rendered transparent.

so you can have transparency on separated objects and parts of objects

it still has some problems when multiple transparent objects get overlapped, but its something

Cheers and have fun

i managed to achieve very nice transparency with XNA on a couple of basic objects

take a look:

the blue ball is inside of the big transparent ball and the other objects are behind

cheers and have fun!

i have been messing with the lighting that comes with the basic effect and with the appropriate settings you can get very interesting results, look at this screens:

these 3 images are using only the included lighting of the XNA 2 BasicEffect with different settings in direction, intensity, diffuse and specular colors

Cheers and have fun!

if you are in the Dream Build Play 2008 contest you can win a free 4 month membership to the XNA Creators Club just by submitting your final game to the contest within the contest valid time period, which ends September 23 i think.

this is a very nice incentive for everybody to continue developing its dbp game.

Cheers and have fun!!

Finally!!.. the details of the royalties and the way commercial games will work on Xbox Live community games this year holidays

This is the official announcement:

Make Money with Xbox Live Community Games

i was playing with the settings of the XNA BasicEffect and it ended up in a nice little scene..  its not exactly amazing.. but well lets say its just nice hehe

here it is :

the earth is actually rotating which gives a nice effect ,but that cant be seen in just a screenshot

Cheers!

my space reached 2000 views!, twice as fast as what it took to reach 1000 views, so it means the amount of visits to my space are increasing everyday, here is a pic:

thanks for the encouraging amount of visits yay!

and stay tune for more updates on my projects :o)

firefox 3 has been released just a couple of hours ago with lots of nice improvements, and they are trying to break a guinness record for software with most downloads in 24 hours

if you want to join the madness go here http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

Cheers!

Lately ive been working on CoatlGDK and the progress is good, a bit slow but good.

for the moment i have a couple base clases and components

i just finished a free camera and a target camera is almost done, i also want to do a chase / third person camera after this

here is a pic:

here is the free camera in companion with my model class, i made a gizmo mesh and oriented it correctly to give me an idea of which side is up , right you know.

stay tune for more updates, soon i will start working on some bigger stuff

Cheers and have fun!

after the announcement of the Dream Build Play contest, i have been preparing myself to start developing my game that will be sent as an entry to the dbp contest that will use the earliest versions of CoatlGDK as a base.

i hope i will be able to finish something decent by september 23 which is the dbp contest final date to send your entries

wish me luck!!

after a brief break, im going to continue with the development of CoatlgGDK and see if i can release something usable in a decent timeframe

currently CoatlGDK will be open source and will be hosted on codeplex currently theres nothing in there yet , but the url is :

http://www.codeplex.com/coatlgdk  - CoatlGDK Project Page on CodePlex

it will have the new BSD License or maybe the MIT license, because the ordinary open source licenses like the GPL or LGPL just doesnt seem right for my taste at this moment.

the project just started a couple of weeks ago , but was put on hold to take care of some other business , but now im going to continue developing it ,but dont expect any release soon

also i have updated the CoatlGDK logo with this :

Cheers! and have fun!

Thats right, today the details of the dream build play contest has ben published.

now focusing on xbox360 game development, they are also giving free 12 month trial membership to the xna creators clubs to people who registers for the contest to allow you to develop in your xbox360 even if you are not premium member, sadly people without an xbox360 console will not be able to participate..

there will be 75,000 dollars in prices!!

the contest ends september 23 2008 , so go and start developing you cool games

go to the Dream Build Play 2008 contest official website

a very nice animation library for xna has ben released by bruno evangelista on codeplex for skinned models and works with windows and xbox, go and check it out for yourself

XNAnimation Library on CodePlex

Surfing around i found out that microsoft released a very cool app, which gives you access to all the telescope imagery and space cartography from various famous telescope like the hubble, chandra and others.

you can pan and zoom in the space imagery and explore stars,nebulas and galaxies, this definately is a software that is up to the scale of google earths awesomeness!!

go here to get it, its Free and awesome!!

World Wide Telescope official homepage

i have noticed that if you open a previously created XNA 2.0 project in visual C# 2008 with xna gs 3 ctp installed, it will work just fine.

it will build and deploy succesfully in windows and xbox360 just fine, it will just reference xna 2 assemblies and the content pipeline correctly and allow the deployment to xbox360.

the downsides are that the xna 2 project templates are not visible in visual C# 2008 so it still will not have full xna 2 functionality but almost

i just tried to deploy the benjamin nitchke's xna racer to the xbox 360 and it all went just ok , so if you want to give it a try go ahead

Cheers and have fun!

the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP was released today, so go and try it while still hot, this version as stated before will only work with visual studio 2008 express or higher like std or pro.

this release is more focused to zune game development as xbox 360 is not supported in this CTP, only winodws and zune are currently supported.

this is the text straight from the xna 3 ctp download page.

" This release represents the Community Technology Preview of Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0, which enables hobbyists, academics, and independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows and the Microsoft Zune digital media player using optimized cross-platform gaming libraries based on .NET.

Targeting the Xbox 360 console is not supported in this CTP release. It will be supported in the final release version.
This CTP release of the 3.0 version contains support for the Visual Studio 2008 family of products and for developing games that run on the Microsoft Zune digital media player. In addition, there are enhancements to the XNA Framework API for media support and sound effects "

Download XNA GS 3 CTP Here

Cheers!

For those still interested in using XNA with visual studio 2008, remember that XNA 3.0 will work by default with visual studio 2008.

but if you are one of those that doesnt want to wait, heres a solution

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/game/xna2.0vs2k8.aspx

http://xna-uk.net/files/folders/templates/entry985.aspx

however those solutions are not completely functional as using xna 2 right now with visual studio 2008 makes you loose some functionality , for example all the content pipeline easy functionality as in 2005 will be lost, the content pipeline is a msbuild task.. you could do it from vs 2008 but not in a graphical way as the ide plugin that game studio installs by default in vs2005 for the content pipeline, also you loose all the xbox deployment functionality.

so currently doing that is very unpractical , so my advice would be just stay with vs2005 for now and wait for xna 3 to get released and then you use vs2008 ..

i made the logo of CoatlGDK yesterday and this will be the one it will be using when the project gets more complex and starts to take shape

the CoatlGDK logo:

i know its a bit basic .. but i like it

Cheers!!

today April 15  i noticed that my space has reached its first 1000 views, thats very very cool, lets hope more and more people visits my space and hopefully gets another thousand visits

thank you for visiting my space and keep coming because there will be more posts and more news in the future with my current XNA project CoatlGDK so stay tune..

Cheers and Have Fun!!

CoatlGDK is the name of my new project which will be the engine that in the future my games will use.

it will be a minimalistic XNA 2 engine and i say minimalistic to avoid saying it will have a huge lack of features hahahaha

currently i have just placed the first building blocks of this long term project and start to setting the scene system and the base classes, right now it will be 100% based on BasicEffect rendering and when it gets a bit more complex maybe i will start messing with shader stuff

heres a pic, really nothing spectacular right now hahaha just a couple of free models from turbosquid used to test what i have done so far :)

i hope that sometime in the future this projects gets far enough to achieve a relatively decent level

and maybe sometime in the future too it would help me to release a xbox game to the general public when xna gs 3 comes out

Cheers and have fun!!