Creators Club Communiqué 15

It has been a cold and wintery week here in the greater Seattle area. This weekend even brought a few flurries. When that happens we stay indoors as many of us are not built for chilly weather. Luckily, many people take this time to code and write about it!

As ever, Ziggyware was a hive of information and productivity. Matt Pettineo’s article on Deferred Shadow Maps using the XNA framework could help any Creator make more realistic looking shadows. In their forums’ code snippet section Ziggyware also gathers four new extension methods for their ever-expanding XNA Utility Library.

Kyle Hayward shared a follow-up to his post introducing you to volume ray-casting with an article that explores transfer functions and shading using the XNA framework. It features some pretty creepy looking skulls and stuff, too.

Catalin “Link’n Logger” Zima shared this sample of a mouse cursor similar to the one from 2-D boy’s World of Goo he created using the XNA framework. This is part of his quest to explore features from games that he finds interesting. It should end up being fun to watch!

Finally, personally I couldn’t get enough of puppy cam. Of course, now everyone has been kind enough to share kitten cam with me, too. It is just impossible to have a bad day after watching these.

xxoo

~kathleen sanders

XNA Community Manager