This is the first of a series of programming tutorials focusing on games programming. This first article is going to try to give an overview of what we are going to be using to accomplish this and a little history of the tools themselves. Don’t worry if some of this is confusing, try to pick up what you can and then more forward to the first lesson. Do at least snag the files from the “What will I need?” section to get everything installed though.
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I’m just working on the code which will form the basis of my upcoming tutorial and it’s a huge learning experience for me. One thing I haven’t really focussed on before was optimisation of .NET code. While I’ve re-factored code because it was doing things in a ’roundabout’ way that could be optimised, I haven’t had to ever worry about real-time performance before. With XNA, a sudden pause or glitch is going to be bad for a game.

One thing that will cause glitches in XNA games is if the garbage collector kicks in at an inappropriate time so a strategy to avoid this needs to be adopted quite early on in development of your game engine.

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This is very, very cool. Take a look at the embedded video for a short talk and demo on what photosynth is and then go and have a play for yourself. I found the technical preview did not work in firefox but installs fine in IE.

There are only a few collections online at the moment, but I think you just have to go and look at the BBC collection based on the tv programme How We Built Britain. Trafalgar Square is a must!

I’ve been carrying around £40 worth of Waterstone’s vouchers for almost two years now and decided to stop wandering in there on the off-chance I would see something I really liked to use them up. Instead, I waited for something I really wanted and ordered it into the local branch.
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With the new release of XNA Refresh, you can now easily add fonts to your projects. While it is nice to just specify a true type font in an xml file and have XNA import the resulting bitmap generated from it, I prefer to be able to edit the bitmap in photoshop to make it look better.

Thankfully, someone else has written a nice tool to create the intermediary bitmap for you. All you then need to do is select the white characters in photoshop and start applying effects!