Madsoft Games
Game Development Website

A few days ago I got a XNA Trial Account, which will last for 1 year! This can be done by every student, via the Microsoft Dreamspark Project, the only thing you need to do, is to obtain a ISIC card, which costs around 12€!
But there are lots of benefits with such a card, you can also get other software for free (e.g. Visual Studio 2008/2010 Professional).
Well, now I can develop on XBox for 1 year. And I have also choosen a little XBox Game project, but I don’t want to tell yet
[It'll make use of Sunburn and Avatars ]

Today I continued working on Esenthel.Net, which is wrapper around a native C++ engine, called Esenthel Game Engine. It’s a fully featured engine, with world- and mesh editor, but you can only use it in C++. So I decided to write a C++/CLI wrapper, in order to use it also in C#.
The basic features are already implemented, but since the engine contains hundreds of classes, there’s still lots of work to do!
With basic features, I not only mean loading and displaying of meshes or images and transforming this stuff via the math classes, but also features like loading whole worlds of the world editor into the game!
Well, you’ll hear of my progress soon


[of course I don't stop using XNA with the sunburn engine ]

Today it’s pretty hard to create good 3D Games without any Physics Engine, physics is needed nearly everywhere from simple Sphere-To-Sphere collision detection to collision response of convex shapes. One option is to code it all on you own, but this isn’t very easy and therefore very time consuming. So most of us would prefer a simple Physics Engine for using it with XNA.


Well, in my opinion there are three Physics Engines, which you might want to take a look at. In the following I’ll present them to you.




JigLibX:
Pricing: Free/Open Source
Plattforms: PC & XBox360
Performance: Low (especially on XBox360)


Bepu:
Pricing: 4% royalities
Plattforms: PC & XBox360
Performance: Good


PhysX.Net
Pricing: Free/Open Source(wrapper code)
Plattforms: PC
Performance: Awesome (GPU)

Last weekend I purchased the community version of the Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine for XNA and I really like it so far. I did some tests with Sunburn and the Bepu physics engine and this is the result:





Additionally I’ve tried out the sgMotion Animation Library, which is actually just a wrapper around the XNAnimation Library, but compatible with the sunburn content pipeline.

The engine comes with around seven easy to understand samples, and you can find a big community on their website, where you can also ask for help and find answers on your questions.

Furthermore the Interface of the engine is pretty simple for experienced programmers, every manager is based on a interface, which you can extend. The perfomance and the quality of shadows and light is also awesome, you can choose between the deferred and the forward renderer. So you can choose the renderer which best fits for your application, if you have e.g. 30 lights, then choose deferred, otherwise for instance the forward renderer.





The editor is also very cool and flexible, you can extend it pretty easily. But the editor is only a lighting and material editor! You can’t move objects in there, which sounded terrible to me at the beginning…

Well, since you can easily extend the editor, and the features already implemented are awesome I think it isn’t that bad.

Now to the programming itself, as I already mentioned, it’s pretty easy to achieve cool results. You e.g. only need these two lines to add a object to the scene:

Model scene = Content.Load<Model>("Room/room");
sceneInterface.ObjectManager.SubmitStaticSceneObject(scene, 
Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(0, 0, 0)), 
ObjectVisibility.RenderedAndCastShadows);

And the other stuff is not much more complex, if you don’t know something you can look in the samples, or even ask on the forum. So all in all I think this is an amazing engine, but it’s only a amazing lighting and rendering engine, because no other features are officially supported. But you can always easily extend the engine code.

Probably next weeks I’ll start a little game project, which will be using this engine.




Pricing:
Sunburn Framework: Free
Sunburn Professional: 199$/149$
Sunburn Community: 399$/299§
Sunburn Studio: 1499$

Hello and Welcome to my new website, or should I call it a blog? Well, I will post articles, show my projects, and of course (since this is a wordpress blog) I’ll blog a bit
You can primarily find information on Game Development, and especially on XNA. As you might have notices, English isn’t my native language, so please be indulgent to me.

If you have any questions on the posts, you can always leave a comment and I’ll try my best to answer your question. And of course I appreciate any given feedback.