I had recently been speaking with Luigi Auriemma, (fellow reverser and a great one at that), regarding the Asura Engine extraction process and to cut a long story short, when I asked about using some source of his for AsuraCmp extraction, he brought up the point of why my projects were closed source. The push to go open source is a good idea and besides the freedom to leverage existing and somewhat complex code, it would also allow my applications to prosper a little more than what they…

I have just released a beta version of the Asura Engine Extractor. Please go to the project page for more information!

Here’s a quick XNA 4.0 particle demo. It can use a custom texture or if no texture is passed, it’ll emulate point sprites by using a 1x1 similar to my previous post regarding SpriteBatch based lines. Check out the source code and take a look for yourself. Download Source Code [pro-player type="mp4"]/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Particle2D.mp4[/pro-player]

I’m going to get started with learning XNA 4.0 especially as it allows development for the new Microsoft Phone 7 device, which for me, to leverage such an existing technology that I understand, at least to a small degree and can basically get straight into, is quite an exciting prospect. Here’s are the goodies: MSDN >> Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Shawn Hargreaves Blog >> Breaking changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone: Developer Home MSDN >> XNA Game Studio 4.0 MSDN >> Windows Phone…

What I should have mentioned was XNA 4.0 was just a part of the download mentioned in the last post. It also allows the writing of Silverlight applications and under the Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition. It’s been a while since I’ve used XNA in any form whatsoever, so coming into XNA 4.0 with a half-cocked memory of what was what and finding out a great deal of it "actually wasn’t” was something of an experience. I decided to knock up a quick and dirty missile game, and the first thing that…