Flash files embedded in your XNA games for cut scenes or fancy menus?

http://groups.google.com/group/fluix

BTW I’ve changed my XBox gamer tag from Dentreader (which was an accident!) to WeeReepicheep (which is deliberate!!).

Darryl

Congratulations to 2nd student Niamh Scullion on being appointed Microsoft student rep. for the Coleraine campus this year.

Two teams of computing students from the Coleraine campus have been placed in the top 20 teams in the world in the game development section of Imagine Cup 2008 in a competition which began with over 600 team entries from across the world. The Imagine Cup is a hugely successful international competition with over 100 000 participants from over 100 countries world-wide. Dr Darryl Charles who organises computing student competition entries through the Creative Computing student group on the Coleraine campus commented, “This is a remarkable success for our students in a very highly competitive international competition. Our students competed against teams from Japan, USA, Canada, Germany and many other countries with a strong pedigree for game development”.

Team 1 (Pringle Monkey) were James Burke (mentor), David Gibson, James Dempsey, Niamh Scullion, and Richard Paul. Team 2 (R.A.N.D.O.M) were Alan Turpin (mentor), Chris Hanna, and Debbie Mitchell. Short video clips of each “Sustainable Environment” themed games can be found on the following links:

R.A.N.D.O.M: “Mephitis Pyre“

Pringle Monkey: “Future Shock“

We have a few students capable of entering Dream-Build-Play 2008.

For those of you who have decent XNA games created in the last year I would advise having a look at this.

I will want to encourage students to get started early on competitions next year so here is some information.

The theme for the imagine cup next year has been announced:

“Imagine how to apply technology to solve the world’s toughest social problems.”

This theme will be valid for the next 3 years and is based on the United Nations millennium development goals:

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

Also announced this week is the theme for the XNA Ireland competition – “Asteroids”.

In case some of you haven’t spotted it yet – we can try out some of the features of XNA 3.0 already:

http://www.thezbuffer.com/articles/535.aspx

As far as I see the the main aspect of this release is to showcase XNA for Zunes but what will interest us is the new SoundEffect class which will make life a lot easier for us “programming” types – i.e. we can insert sounds and music without having to use the XACT tool.

Last week Barry Herbert, Michael McCrystal, and Graham Taylor travelled to Tiperray Institute with lecturer Darryl Charles to compete in the XNA Ireland Space Invaders competition. After only 4 weeks of intense work on a 3D version of space invaders the team just missed out on a top three finish after some very stiff competition.

Irish TV channel TV3 covered the event and Barry was interviewed about his teams game:

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=2-MytS2Uzg0

Through an EduServ Athens validation system, all University of Ulster staff and students can download free Microsoft developer software from https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/Products.aspx. This is in addition to our school subscription to the MS Academic Alliance.

The most exciting thing for us, perhaps, is the free Creators Club membership. It may have a few limitations compared to the full paid membership (some free software etc.) but it is great news for our students who would prefer to spend their money on games or books (not!). 

Darryl

We were delighted recently to find out that computing students at UU Coleraine will be backed by a MS scholarship of 5000 Euros per year.

This was given to us due to our course innovation and high quality student performance. It will be used for student prizes and supporting innovative extra-curricular activities that help market positive aspects of Computing.  

Spotted this video from the XNA 2.0 roadshow:

http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/chopsticks/default.aspx?id=188

It may help a few of us get networking going a bit quicker.