FlatRedBall

As most of you surely know, XNA 4 is nearing a final release. We’re going to be a little more active on this compared to previous XNA updates. We’re aiming to get a release (at least for the Windows Phone) the same month that non-beta XNA 4 is released. We’ve already started working on this new engine, and we’re also looking to have full Glue support for this platform at launch as well.

While this may sound like all good news, there is one downside. Unfortunately Visual Studio 2010 introduces some new properties in the .csproj file which require .NET 4.0 to parse properly. In fact, if a .NET 3.5 or earlier project attempts to open a XNA 4 project, a crash results.

The reason this matters is because along with making generated code files, Glue modifies your Visual Studio project file. To parse Windows Phone projects, we need to update Glue to .NET 4.0, and along with it XNA 4.

Therefore, the next version of Glue will run on .NET 4 and XNA 4, meaning you will need to download and install the XNA 4 package. We’ll most likely include this in the FRB installer; however, the download is about 400 MB and may require you to restart your computer. If you’d like to prepare ahead of time, you may want to do the download now:

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/launchcenter

–Vic–

Sorry to break the pattern of “yet another update” but I was amazed by this story:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38556042/ns/us_news-giving/?GT1=43001

I just finished uploading a new version of FRB. Since it’s so close to the last version there aren’t a ton of improvements, but it does contain some important bug fixes:

* The AnimationEditor no longer crashes when double-clicking a 0-Frame AnimationChain.
* The NewProjectCreator can now be launched through Glue without crashing.
* Polygon merging is part of FSB

And a few other minor fixes and improvements. Thanks all for reporting bugs and good luck in your development!

–Vic–

I actually didn’t plan on doing this release this morning, but I wanted to see if some of the template changes that I’d made were actually working properly, and while I was working on it I thought – okay, let’s just finish the whole thing.

This release brings a few small fixes and improvements to the engine – nothing huge. One big thing that we’re working towards (no surprises here) is continuing to make cross-platform development easier. This release brings templates that now have their .dll files in subdirectories in the Libraries folder. That means that if you combine an XNA 360 and XNA PC projects, you will no longer have issues with both referencing the same .dll and giving you very confusing compile errors.

I apologize for slowing down this last month – I’ve been very busy with contracts. However, they’re coming to a close soon and I anticipate having a lot more time to work on FRB in the coming months, so the releases this fall will be much bigger and add lots of new features. Stay tuned!

–Vic–

Thanks to everyone for being patient with this new release.  It’s finally out and ready to go.

NOTE:  If you’re using Glue and have a project that you have been working on so far, you must make some manual changes to your project for it to work with the current release of Glue.  More info on this here:

http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=Upgrade_Information:June_2010

As always this release fixes a number of engine bugs and completes some collision interface.  As far as Glue goes, this new release adds support for creating new projects right in Glue instead of manually opening the NewProjectCreator.  Newly-created projects are even loaded automatically in Glue!

Other changes include support for async Screen loading, exposing PositionedObject variables on Entities, and Screen inheritance.

–Vic–

For those of you looking for support on the forums or a new release of the engine, I apologize and ask if possible to just be patient for a little while longer.

FlatRedBall is very close to releasing its first internally-made Xbox Indie Game! I’m very excited about it, and because of that I’ve been pouring every free second I have into getting this game ready for play test.

We’re very close, and as soon as it gets back into play test everything will return to normal – including a new release.

Thanks to everyone who is waiting around. We’re almost done!

–Vic–

Great new ARES video is up. Check it out:

A.R.E.S. by Extend Studio from Nenin Ananbanchachai on Vimeo.

Super thanks to Torsten and Josh! Josh reported a malware problem on FRB, and Torsten looked into it and saw that we had some Wordpress scripts changed. He fixed them up and the problems should be gone.

We apologize for any inconvenience or scares this may have caused.

–Vic–

Congratulations to the Cyber Edge Studios team for releasing Quarantine!  As far as I know this is their first Xbox Indie Game title, so it’s a big first for them.  This is also big news for FlatRedBall as this is the 2nd game to be released on the Xbox using our engine.

I’ve updated our Games page to include a Quarantine page.  It can be found here:

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

Way to go guys!  Good luck with sales and your future development.

–Vic–

I know, release after release…

Our good friend jrxnadev found some problems with Glue which we had to fix so his project could keep going. Thanks to him for being patient with us and reporting these issues. The new version is now up.

–Vic–