Long time, no see

by Benjamin Nitschke 27. October 2006 14:43

Hi everyone,

sorry for not posting anything for a long time now (last post is almost 2 months away). I was very busy writing a new cool game with help of the XNA Framework, the game will also be a starter kit in the upcoming XNA Game Studio Express release and it looks really cool. More about that later ...

In the meantime our new causal games brand www.Quicksandentertainment.de released Pizza Commander on www.PizzaCommander.de (I talked about the game in August) and a new game Rocket Racer was just released, which is also based on the Rocket Commander Engine. You can check it out here: www.RocketRacer.de
For both games there is a demo available (just 20 MB), so you can check out the game and see if you like it. The full version is currently only available in Germany and Poland, but we keep searching for more publishers and continue to release it worldwide :)

In Rocket Racer you fly around with your Rocket and it feels very similar as Rocket Commander at first, but it has a lot of new graphics and effects. After a while you will see that just flying around will not do it, you have to fly through gates to get time and more points. If your time runs out, you die. The levels are quite challenging and I played the game over 10 times now from start to finish and it still is fun :D Well, call me crazy.

In the meantime the new DirectX SDK October 2006 came out. It features now a better PIX tool and makes it possible to debug shaders directly from your applications, which might be useful for Managed DirectX applications. Managed DirectX 2.0 is now also removed and will not work anymore (e.g. NormalMapCompressor v1.4 will not work anymore, use NormalMapCompressor v1.3 or v1.2).

Microsoft also announced a few days ago that there will be a second XNA beta in a few weeks, while the final release is going to happen later this year (which means december and before the holidays). The new beta will include many new cool features, for example the content pipeline and support for model files and also a lot more help and documentation.

More information about XNA, tips, my development diaries and the new upcoming XNA Starter Kit Game I wrote will come soon :)

Rocket Racer Screenshot 1: