QuMIX! MIX at Queen's University in Belfast

small_promo (2) Today I went up to Belfast with Vincent Vergonjeanne and Liam Cronin to present at QuMIX '07.  Mike McMeekin, who is a Microsoft Student Partner at Queen's University Belfast did a fabulous job setting up the afternoon, so special thanks go to him and all of his hard work.

The afternoon included a session on Imagine Cup by Liam.  This included all of the information needed to get started for students interested in participating in the Imagine Cup for this year as well as lots of super giveaways!  There were games, software DVDs and all kinds of betas for people. 

Next, Vincent talked about Silverlight and showed how to use Expression to create some Silverlight content with vectors and animations.  He did a great job covering Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 and showing off the various capabilities of Expression.  Vincent is especially qualified to showcase all of these features as he is the creator of Bubble Factory!  BubbleFactory is proudly displayed in the Silverlight Gallery on the Silverlight.net site, and is one of two representations of Silverlight Ireland (the other one being the Animated 3D Polyhedra)!

Lastly I talked about XNA and how to get started developing games for Windows and the XBox 360 with XNA.  We went through the XNA framework, creating and using assets, the Content Pipeline, assets for your game and debugging an XNA game.  We also took a look at a very basic 3D game.  I had an XBox controller with me to help me play Spacewar and control some of the games.  Afterwards, as usual, I got some really good questions that I'm posting here because I think they could be useful for others:

Can I use the XNA Framework for Games for Windows - LIVE?

Yes, the 2.0 release of the XNA framework incorporates Games for Windows - LIVE.  You can use it to incorporate gamer profiles, guide functionality, and networking into your games.

Are there any good 3D physics engines for XNA yet?

There are a couple with which people have reported good experiences.  For example, the New Zealand Imagine Cup team built their physic simulators with XNA and the AGEIA physics engine, which seemed to work quite well.  If you're using PC only, you could try the C# physX wrapper written by the guys who did the BulletX port (won't work on XBox 360 because it pinvokes to the unmanaged library, though).

There are a few more on www.codeplex.com, search for physics and you'll find some others to try.

If you're interested in 2D, try the Farseer Physics Engine for XNA and Silverlight, located here.

Are there any changes to XNA with .Net 3.0?

Actually the 2.0 release still targets the .Net Framework 2.0, so you won't see any changes there, at least definitely not from the PC side.  The XBox piece of XNA Game Studio 2.0 is not yet released, so not sure if anything's changed with that implementation.

I was intending to do the session as a two-part talk on both XNA and Robotics Studio, but we ended up only having timeimage for XNA.  It's not hard to believe with all the new stuff going on in XNA Game Studio 2.0.  So I am planning on coming back in the Spring and doing a more Robotics-oriented session for those interested.  Mike mentioned in his blog that my robot is the source of my power, which could very well be true - don't be fooled by his seemingly innocent demeanor! ;-) 

Technorati Tags: XNA Game Studio , XNA

Cross posted from Martha's Blog