Bill Reiss (www.bluerosegames.com) and Andy Beaulieu (www.andybeaulieu.com) have submitted a video for the Mix 08 Show Off event.

The video hightlights the work each of them has done using the Farseer Physics Engine with Silverlight.

If you're going to Mix 08 look for it at the Show Off event. (Note: it still needs to make the "cut" to be part of the ShowOff video reel)

I'll try to get a link to the video after the Show Off event is over.

The following are some dates I'm watching closely. The first and third are important if you develop games using Microsoft technologies.
The 2nd one just sounds interesting...

Febuary 20th:

Microsoft's keynote at the GDC where I THINK they are going to unveil a new XNA community program.

They have been talking a lot about creating a "You Tube For Games" and many suspect this will be what they anounce. I'm interested to see if there will be some means for independent game developers to make a little ching for their hard work.

In the "I can only hope" category, it would be nice if they would mention some intiative around Silverlight game development.  I'm not holding my breath for that though.

Febuary 27th:

Mystery technology to be unveiled by Microsoft Research. See here for the post by Robert Scoble that got me interested in this.

March 5th:

Mix 08 Begins.  The wraps will come off Silverlight 2.0.  My game, Diver, is being developed for this platform and I'm anxious to see what's new and changed. 

Also, like I mentioned above, it sure would be nice if they would announce some game deveopment initiatives around Silverlight. I think games would be a great way for Microsoft to drive Silverlight 2.0 acceptance.  They do have this little site known as MSN Games after all.

So, keep your mouse pointer at the ready and let's see what happens...

I've just released the latest version of the Farseer Physics Engine. You can download it here.

Here is a list of the changes and bug-fixes for this version.

• Small change to Vertices.Translate().
  • Given a vector, this method was doing a subtraction for the translation where it should have been adding. If you were using this method you will need to negate the vector you were passing in to this method.
• Changed Vertices.CalculateMomentOfInertia() to Vertices.GetMomentOfInertia()
  • This was done to match naming convention used by other methods in the class. If using this method you will need to do a global find/replace.
• Changed Vertices.GetMomentOfInertia to center the verts on its centroid prior to calculating the moment of inertia.
  • It made more sense to do this. The underlying vertice values are not changed permanently by this method only for the calculation.
• Added BodyFactory.CreatePolygonBody(..., Vertices vertices, ...) overload.
  • This method takes a set of vertices and uses them to calculate the moment of inertia so the user doesn't need to do this themselves.
  • Example: the code below will create a body with it’s MomentOfInertia automatically calculated to be that of the triangle defined by the vertices passed in. In the past you would have had to call verts.CalculateMomentOfInertia, then set that explicitly on the Body after it was created.

verts = new Vertices();

verts.Add(ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(200, 200));

verts.Add(ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(100, 200));

verts.Add(ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(100, 300));

testBody = BodyFactory.Instance.CreatePolygonBody(physicsSimulator, verts, 1);

• Changed GeomFactory.CreatePolygonBody(..).
  • This method will now automatically align the centroid (center of mass) of the geom with the associated body position unless an offset is provided in which case the geom’s centroid will be offset from the body by the amount of the offset.
  • Previously this method caused a lot of confusion if the vertices were not defined relative to 0,0. With this change, verts can now be defined anywhere and this method will fix up the verts so they act as though they were created relative to 0,0.
• Changed the way Body rotation, totalRotations, and revolutions are tracked and clamped.
  • This change was suggested by ‘yota’ in the CodePlex Issue Tracker.
  • The rotation of a body is now clamped as follows: 0 <= rotation < 2Pi. (It use to be -2Pi < rotation < 2Pi)
  • In addition, the revolutions are more accuratly tracked if a large rotation value is passed in to the Body.Rotation property. Thanks again to yota for this fix.
  • Finally, Body.revolutions, which was a private internal variable in Body now has a property accesor.
• Fixed linear drag bug found by michael_brooks11 from the codeplex forums.
  • Linear drag was not being computed properly.
  • See this post for more info: https://www.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ProjectName=FarseerPhysics&ThreadId=21087
  • You may need to adjust existing ‘LinearDrag’ settings for your bodies due to this change.
• Finally implemented Vertices.SubDivideEdges(float maxEdgeLength) method
  • Farseer prefers an even spread of vertices even on straight edges. This method makes it to take any set of vertices and sub-divide the edges so that no edge is longer than some given length.

I hope you like the new look.

I'm just putting the finishing touches on the rest of the Farseer Games site so stay tuned.

 -Jeff