FlatRedBall

Finally! That…took a long time! First, I apologize to everyone who’s been waiting for this release. Microsoft does a fantastic job of upgrading XNA on a yearly basis, but every time we do we scramble to make sure everything is working right after the upgrade and there is always unexpected stuff.

So, what’s new? Well, of course, now we support XNA 3.0 and that means COMMUNITY GAMES!!! Very exciting stuff. In conjunction with that, we’ve (well, ok, mostly Terry) organized the .Content project so that all from file stuff works in the engine WITHOUT including the .Content.dll. That means you can load from file AND distribute your game to folks with only the runtime. That obviously also includes the Community Games – another distribution win.

The up-side to having waited until the end of the month to release is that we implemented a LOT of fixes. Lots of FRBDK improvements on stability and performance, and as always bug fixes and improvements on the engine.

So what are you waiting for? The new FRB is a simple .exe download and double-click away. As always let us know about issues you have. 2009, here we come!

–Vic–

Somjade (whose work you may have seen on Trashman) decided to make some FRB mascots for us. I’m a huge anime fan so this is really really cool. Check it out:

–Vic–

As those of you who have been following the releases may have realized, we skipped November. But worry not, that’s not because we didn’t spend time working on the engine. Instead, we had some installer issues that we were working out, and while that was happening the engine and FRBDK were still moving along full speed.

Very full speed.

Don’t believe me? Check out the version history for December 2009:

http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=FlatRedBall_XNA_Version_History_2009

It may be our biggest update yet in terms of fixes.

What kind of things changed this month?

The TileEditor is the biggest changing part with so many new improvements including click+drag movement of props, collision support, and a LOT of bug fixes. Also, the wiki for the TileEditor now includes a video showing you how to get started with the TileEditor.

Lots of improvements on FSB as well including multiple camera support, text bug fixes, sub-pixel texture coordinate support for Sprites, and a lot of performance improvements.

Other improvements this month include a lot of stability and feature adds to ListDisplayWindows and PropertyGrids, more general FSB/FRB XNA syntax unification, and a number of fixes related to loading a variety of FRB file types.

I encourage everyone to check out the new TileEditor and the tutorials on the wiki. I think you’ll like what we’ve done…oh, and before I forget here’s the TileEditor wiki link:

http://www.flatredball.com/TileEditorWiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Thanks for all of the bug reports and we’ll see you next month with another awesome update!

–Vic–

For those of you waiting for the next release of FRB, this is probably not the update you wanted…but that’s coming this weekend now that we’ve finally fixed some installer issues.

However, if you’re new to FRB you might still appreciate the two new tutorials that can be found on our tutorials page:

http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=Category:FlatRedBall_XNA_Tutorials

They are tutorials #12 and #13 under Learning FlatRedBall covering attachments and collision – two very powerful but often misunderstood features in FRB. Hopefully this will help new users get up to speed faster.

Keep an eye on the front page, the next release is coming this weekend – and it has a LOT of improvements.