Following on from my previous article we don the rubber gloves and grab Zeus’s lightning bolt to launch it on other platforms.

A while ago myself whilst playing around with “other” platforms decided to review a set of books from the fantastic Packt Publishers who kindly sent us a few titles to give out opinion on, I picked up:

A ways back when, Mike Ormond (Microsoft Evangelist for Windows Phone and all round nice guy) put out a request for articles for a Microsoft sponsored Windows Phone book (which you can still find the first edition of here), I like so many others gladly took up the challenge and wrote a chapter or two for said book and submitted them.

It all started one sunny morning when Michael Hoffman who wrote a shocking article on some fantastic lighting effects all done with XNA, I read this and was immediately impressed just how simple his solution was.

Just to round up the overview part of this series where I have covered frameworks doing their level best to take the dream of XNA onward and available to more platforms, plus looking further into the future to extend and build upon XNA’s humble beginnings, it is worth looking over some of the other frameworks which use XNA as a baseline and give you more bang for your buck (time wise).

So far in this series I have covered:

Things have been quite recently what with the Holidays and all. In fact WordPress even gave me an early present when I updated they kindly reset my entire site back to it’s theme defaults, how nice of them.

While putting together the UnityXNA article I cast aside all warnings and threw caution to the wind and spent a bit of time trying to get my 3D starter XNA sample in to the framework, it should come as no surprise from the tenant of that article that I failed, granted I only spent about an hour or so on it but I realised quickly why it was only 2D so far.

Continuing on the exploration of XNA future I posted about an interesting new framework that was brewing by Barnaby Smith over at MVINetwork, a curious project aiming to bring the ease of use of XNA into the Unity3D engine.

As part of a new “Back to basics” series which extends on my original XNA Futures article some months ago, I am going to cover all the options I explained back then in more detail plus probably a few others which have come to light recently.

Just to cross post back to my own blog (really did that the wrong way round ) here’s my entry to the Intel App-Up competition now being run on codeproject, if you got an idea for an app or game for Windows 8 then you should write a short article for the comp about your idea and you may even walk away with a free Intel Ultrabook to build it with.

Boy what a crazy couple of months, to kick things off I got my first Windows 8 game up and running and through the App Excellence labs on to the Store in prompt fashion, not a glitch (if you do not count the first lab I attended not understanding what the labs were really there for, putting a tick in the box for your app to go on the store). Not one single issue in submission, it was in and done in about 4 days.