Hello Everyone,

here we are back to really cool stuff. First of all, we are starting our new engine, we have a current code name: Unleashed Engine 2D. As you can see by name, it is 2D, but this doesn't mean that we are rendering only in 2D, but it is directed for 2D gameplay.

We are planning a some nice features, but for now, the coolest is an editor with real-time intercession.
More Desired Features:
- Avatar Support
- Generic Physics Wrapper (until now, it is wrapping the basic functions of Box2D and Farseer)
- Cool pre-created cams
- Post Processing in a easy way
- Animated Sprites and an Editor
- And some others that will appear:P

We are only in beginning, but experimental version is almost done and we will make a stupid demo to test it and of course, it will appear right here.

Another thing that I'm doing and that will be posted in next days/weeks, is an Async Resource Manager! What is it? It is a simple extension to ContentManager. If you already played Halo, you probably have noticed that mid-level loadings are very fast and silent. So I want this kind of loading in my games and this resource manager open this doors for me (I think).
I did it in this weekend and preliminary results are very good.

But, what it does?
- First you need to subdivide yours assets in groups. (Levels, Checkpoints or other else division, you probably think that is fine for you)
- You subdivide that groups using requests. A request is a List of assets ID, Path and Type.
-When you create some group, you want to pass a Callback to be called when manager finish the loading of that group.
- Finally when you think that you will need some resources soon, you call GetResource(name). Manager loads the resource in another thread and callback your application when finishes. So in meantime, the player can continue playing or if it reaches the point where you need to swap resources, you can present a little loading screen, while manager do not finish its work.
- And Yes, you can and you must call Unload(group) or Unload(resourceName) when you think that is desirable.

I'm preparing the sample and fix some minor bugs:) I'll post the source as soon as possible.

Stay tuned

Hello again,

to give some life to blog, I'm posting the latest version of the console component. We've made some modifications for Phyzell and now we give you the updated component.

Initial Console credits go to: Kevin Jurkowski


Change Log:

28-08-09
-----------------
- System Rewritten now commands are added dynamically via Action Delegates.
- Added Support for numeric keys, minus and comma
- Added Support for help messages
- Added a WriteLine method to write in console, even in command action

15-03-09
-----------------
- XNA 3.0 Support *
- Console fits to Window Resize Events




Stay tuned for the next posts!

No we are not going to let the blog die!

We are on school holidays and we are starting to work on our master theses. But in few weeks we will start developing a new game. Once again we will share all the milestones and hopefully release some more samples. =D

However you can take a look at this project: http://xnaphysxtools.codeplex.com/. It's a simple tool that we mostly developed for Phyzell which allows to create PhysX meshes from XNA models. It will be expanded if we get feedback from anyone who wants to use it. Please stay tuned for future developments.

Hello!

We've been working hard for the last couple of weeks, trying to polish some of the techniques we implemented, as well as tweaking the game mechanics. We're quite happy with the final result, after 3-4 months of part-time work in this game.

Well, for now, at least, this is it! We submitted our project (that was developed as a course project of our master's degree in Computer Engineering). We're not prepared to completely say goodbye to Phyzell, so we're dubbing this version as Alpha, hoping that in the future we get enough time and resources to improve this concept and turn it into a real game. Nevertheless, we will definitely use our engine in our future projects for XNA, from which you might be hearing about in the upcoming months.

For now, we leave you with the gameplay video and the installer of the alpha version, so you can try it out for yourselves.

Hi there!

We're very excited with the improvements that Phyzell had over the past couple of weeks. You can watch a gameplay video (here in HD) of the the second pre alpha version (yes, that's what we're calling it).

Just a quick reminder of the techniques we're using in this game:
- Deferred Shading
- Deferred Shadow Maps
- HDR - High Dynamic Range Rendering
- Distortion effect for camouflage
- Particle system for the blackhole graphical representation
- Everything running on a custom made engine that is using PhysX.NET and XNA.

Please, share your thoughts and critics.

Hi again,

I know that this is probably the most antecipated post of this new blog, so check it out=D

Please read README.txt and help us to improve this sample. This uses a very very high resolution shadow map (2048x2048) to obtain excelent results. PCF is nice to handle with aliasing problem of shadow maps, so turn it on (1-4 or G key).

Use WASD to move and press the left mouse button to rotate camera and T to enable/disable shadows.

My work here was very simple, so look at CombineEffect.fx to see how the mix between deferred shading and shadow map is made.

The guys who really did the hard work were:

Deferred Shadow Maps in XNA By Matt Pettineo (mpettineo@gmail.com)
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=235

Deferred Shading in XNA - Implementing a deferred renderer in XNA GS 2.0 by Catalin Zima
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?forum_id=18&thread_id=12743&article_id=155
or
http://www.catalinzima.com/?page_id=14



HERE IT IS:



Thanks

Today we gave a presentation in which we talked about some of the techniques and special effects that we're implementing for Phyzell, including Deferred Shading and Deferred Shadow Maps.

You can check out the slides and watch the following videos.

Hey,

Today we got shadow mapping working on our sand box :D

We based our efforts on two tutorials:

Deferred Shadow Maps in XNA By Matt Pettineo (mpettineo@gmail.com)
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=235

Deferred Shading in XNA - Implementing a deferred renderer in XNA GS 2.0 by Catalin Zima
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?forum_id=18&thread_id=12743&article_id=155
or
http://www.catalinzima.com/?page_id=14


Here's a glimpse at our results:

If you are having problems achieving this, send us a mail or comment this post:D

We've been working hard on Phyzell, trying to implement the engine and all the gameplay. Today we had our second presentation and we're also happy to show you the first pre alpha gameplay video (here in HD) and, if you would like to, you can try it out for yourself!

Well, today we gave a presentation about Phyzell. Yes that's the name of our upcoming FPS. You can check out the few slides we used and watch the video of the current state of development.

Stay tuned for news!

Hi,

today we don't have too much to say, but just to keep you up to date: We are taking the first steps in our Game Engine for the future project. We integrated physX and character controller for now, but next week we will talk about some more aspects and after this we will post some game mechanics details and videos.

In the upcoming weeks, if our work goes well, we will post some nice components developed for the game.

Stay connected!

Hi Everyone,

We are Portuguese Students and we are making games=D.

Now seriously, this blog is a window for our projects and technology we will use to complete them. We will post some Source Code and videos documenting our progress.

You can ask for some help or give us your opinion about our games and share your th

For now, we will post stuff about our first OpenGL game and our next XNA project, for which we are currently testing a PhysX wrapper for XNA.

Stay connected, we will post every test that we made with PhysX , very useful to understand some nice tricks and differences between PhysX and PhysX.Net (the wrapper we are using).