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XNA Game Studio makes it possible to write games for the Xbox without being a developer with good publisher contacts and lots of money to pay for marketing and Xbox development kits. This is great!

However, because the XNA Indie Games system is not fully controlled by Microsoft, certain features of Xbox Live! are not available, because they would be too easily abused. These features include online Leaderboards, and unlockable Achievements.

The XNA community has developed alternatives to those functions. Many XNA games contain "Awardments" that can be unlocked, and many more XNA games use the XNA Network Highscores component to implement distributed, peer-to-peer highscore sharing. The name for this is generally "Online Highscores" rather than "Leaderboards," because the latter name is reserved for use by Microsoft-certified titles that use the real Xbox Live! functionality.

This article introduces version 2 of the XNA Online highscores component, which is free for you to use in your own game under the terms of the MIT license.

There are parental controls in Windows Vista that can prevent a restricted account from using a computer at times you specify. However, if you let your kids have admin accounts (because they keep needing to run programs that need admin for compatibility reasons, say), then this won't work.

Also, Windows XP does not have any feature to limit use to certain times of day.

Show how to generate a random planet based on midplace displacement noise and
a simple height map color ramp. Note that you typically want to add some cloud
cover for the best effect.

Press Space / A to generate a new planet.
Press Backspace / B to view the height map.
Press Y / Y to view the color map.

Released into the public domain by Jon Watte. You may freely use this in your

When developing a PC program for the XNA framework, you usually find that you need to do mouse picking. This means taking the mouse coordinates, and turning them into a ray that you can then raycast in your world to see what, if anything, is being hit when the user clicks the mouse.

2009-03-12 latency2.txt README -- jwatte@forterrainc.com

This program measures scheduling latency/jitter for a CPU bound process on a UNIX system. It is intended to determine the suitability of various virtualization products to hosting real-time processes such as game servers. To compile it, use g++ (make sure it has been properly installed!):

$ g++ -o latency2 latency2.cpp

Inside an XNA game, you invariably start needing to wire things together. "When the player steps on this tile, run that action" or "when this timer expires, open that gate." For simple levels, you may be able to write this using code, but once your game reaches a dozen levels, each with hundreds of possible actions, hard-coding each and every one of them becomes a real nightmare!

Attached, please find a syntax highlighting file for HLSL and Effect files for Notepad++. This file is substantially better than the one available on the Notepad++ main download site:

• It adds all of the Effect file tokens, in UPPERCASE and ProperCase forms.
• It defines operators to let the built-in functions be recognized.
• It recognizes preprocessor directives.

I want to implement my own CSettingsStore that stores data in a file in local application data, rather than the registry. (I note that the documentation claims this is a good idea from a security point of view, but I'm doing it for other reasons).

A number of interfaces exist as support for other interfaces in SAPS. These are collected below.

class ItfAddressable
{
  public:
    /* Where do I post messages to if I want to send a message to this target? */
    virtual Address     Address() = 0;
};
 
class ItfBlock
{
  public:
    /* Read the block -- a pointer to the beginning of the data. */

This proposal is now obsolete. but served to start the discussion.