So TechED Sydney is over and I now have the time to post about the big announcement for students that came out of the event. On Tuesday Microsoft held TechEd Student Day, a free day for students to come along and sit in on a series of presentations geared towards students, TechEd style.

Aside from that, every University student who attended the University half of the day received 4 DVDs full of free software, ready for use. Now if you could not attend this event, do not fret, this is all available for you as well (if you are a student), however you need to download it for yourself.

Head to https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ and Sign In with your Windows Live ID, and then verify your student status and you can get your keys and downloads for all the software listed. This includes:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro
• Visual Studio 2005 Pro
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• 12 Month XNA Creators Club Trial
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• Virtual PC 2007 (Great for use with Windows Server 2003)

Grab the downloads, grab the keys, and start making cool things with this free software. Anything you make can be distributed with a non-commercial license, so get to it!

For those doing native application development that need a Physics or Animation product, Havok, partnered with Intel have released the world famous Havok Physics & Animation package for free.

This gives you the complete binary for use in your personal, educational or even commercial game as long as it is below US$10.

Currently there does not seem to be anything for XNA (despite an apparent job ad a while back), but I am sure this will be wrapped soon enough, and then the power of Havok will be available for use on the PC platform in XNA as well.

You can get Havok from http://tryhavok.intel.com. Just fill out the form and download the Programmer binaries and Artist tools.

The professional video tutorial scene has started to adopt XNA from the looks of it, with Digital Tutors releasing a DVD training package named Pipeline Development with Maya and XNA.

Popular highlights:

XNA Development Overview

Interfacing with Keyboard and Gamepad

Building Controller Systems

Controller Vibration

Exporting and Loading Static Meshes from Maya

Exporting Animated Characters from Maya

Moving and Turning a Character

Object-oriented Programming with Bullets and Targets

Baking Textures in Maya

Deriving Bounding Boxes from Maya

Collision Detection with Bounding boxes

Collision Detection with Rays

Building a Custom Animation Player

Switching and Blending Between Animations

Chase Cameras

Camera Shakes

Drawing Text

CGSociety has this to say about the product:

'Pipeline Development with Maya and XNA' contains nearly five hours of project-based training for technical artists learning the methods of creating game content using XNA and Maya. 'Pipeline Development with Maya and XNA' offers artists an essential workflow and innovative techniques for easily integrating Maya and XNA for game creation.

Since this costs money, I cannot get this at the moment and so I cannot give my own review. However it looks like a good product, and considering Digital Tutor's track record, it should be a good investment for the artistic programmers out there.

Edit [17/5/2008]: I noticed that Digital Tutors also has an interesting looking Training Package titled Real-Time Shaders with XNA.

As of now the XNA 3.0 Community Technology Preview is available for download.

XNA 3.0 CTP

This requires a version of Visual Studio 2008 and will co-exist with Visual Studio 2005 and XNA GS 2.0.

Note there is no Xbox360 support in the CTP release, however there will be with the final release, currently only PC and Zune.

Now I am off to see what else they added. :) Enjoy.

Nvidia has released the first of their acclaimed GPU Gems series for free reading online in its entirety.

These are full HTML forms of the articles, all revolving around techniques for rendering. Completely free.

You can go and read the book here and even take advantage of 30% off the print copy. (See the top of the page, available at time of writing)

So tomorrow begins my first year of university at UTS studying for a Bachelor of Engineering in ICTE Software. (Pretty much Software Engineering)

Should be enjoyable, and should also provide some inspiration so I can get started programming again. Been relaxing too much these holidays.

Big news out of GDC, as most already know. XNA Community Games is finally here, and a general timeframe for XNA 3.0 :) Sad that Australia doesn't get the game preview that is currently running. :(

I am in the process of working on a small game, but still in the tech planning stages, I want this engine to be useful for later projects and maybe even samples or demos.

Dreamspark is also something big that occured which is good for me. Being a student, I can get access to this once it is prepared for Australia. Some great resources in there for students, all for FREE! XD

I need to update more... :S

I just finished up my sample for the 2.0 version of the Post Processor (see first post on this blog) for XNA2.

The sample was built in XNA Game Studio 2.0 on Visual Studio 2005 Pro, and should compile fine in that. To use it just follow the instructions in Usage.txt, which explains how to use the program and also that there are more than enough comments in the code to understand its workings.

If you have any questions, you can use the contact link at the top right, and get me via that, or you can contact me via the forums at www.thehazymind.com/smf, probably best via PM there though, since its not my board. Of course you can also leave comments here. :)

Link:

PostProc2Sample.zip [28kb] (Requires XNA 2.0 and either VS2005 or C# Express Edition 2005 installed, with XNA GSE 2.0 installed over that. - The archive only contains source code to minimize filesize, if you need a binary I will upload that.)

The software I use for this blog got a minor version update today, from 1.2 to 1.3, pretty fast for about 2 1/2 months of work, and a good list of new features and changes. I have taken the time to upgraded to 1.3, must have done something wrong since there were issues with roles and users not transferring right, but that is stuff you don't need to worry about.

This software is a great piece of blogging software written in asp.net 2.0, and with plenty of features being added all the time, as well as a reasonably stable codebase that can be pulled from the CodePlex repository for it.

I am almost done with a basic sample for my Post Processing class, I just need to finish the shader and add some more comments, then pack it up. It should be up here shortly, then I will drop it into my HMEngine branch and work on implementing it in that project as well. So far it is pretty powerful, I just need a nice little usage guide to explain how to put it to use properly, that will come with the sample.

Again with the new blogs, but anyway, phpBB is too big for just blogging, since this is a personal blog there isn't any reason to have a full forum behind it.

So thanks to the BlogEngine.net people, I have a nice little blog to put my stuff with all the features, and in .Net as well. :)

So basically my plans for my time during the holidays now is to create a sample for my ported Post Processor for XNA2.0 (See file dump below for 1.0Refresh version), and also get that integrated into the Hazy Mind engine, with a new tutorial for that.

After that, work on some projects I have been slowly making my way through, they may/may not appear on here, and also get around to learning the graphical content creation aspects of game development, so that I can get content for my XNA games done.

So basically this blog will contain not only XNA and programming related stuff, but also my own personal items, gaming related etc, if you want to focus, there are categories for that.   ;)

In other news, Nemo Krad released his XNA game Breakthrough for both Windows and the Xbox360, this is a new take on the old Breakout/Arkanoid classic, but in 3D, so the ball can move in X,Y and Z, and there are powerups etc, and some nice shader effects. Check it out over at http://darkomengames.co.uk and give it a try.

Now for the file dump, this is basically all the files I uploaded for my old blog (not much) that people might still want to grab, since I do not want to go and recreate the old posts for them.

Post Processor (1.0 Refresh)

and thats about it, the screenshots from Halo 3 I see no point in putting back up.

So subscribe to the RSS feed and there should be more up here soon.