Minor update from v0.195:

• You can now make changes to an Entity's position or rotation even if it has Physics. Previously any changes were overriden by the Physics system and the Entity's position/rotation would not change.
• The camera's frustum is now checked for collision against terrain to keep it from going under the terrain. To turn this off there is a function in CameraComponent.cs called ForceFrustumAboveTerrain, set this to false anytime after you've created a camera component object.
• The message system now allows for instantaneous messages to be sent/retrieved. This means you can now send a message and immediately be sure that the contents of the message have been filled with data for use. You can find an example of this in CameraComponent.cs in the ProcessFrustumTerrainCollision() function. To use immediate messages you need to use the SendMessage(), if you're sending a message that doesn't need to process immediately then use the QueueMessage() function to send the message. SendMessage should only be used in the case where you need that message to be processed immediately in order to use it results, or if you need that message to process before you can do other things that depend on that message having been processed. The reason for allowing messages to delay and not process immediately is because the engine is being designed for multithreading, and multithreading is easier with queued messages.
• Updated to the XNA 3.0 Framework.

For all of the notes on v0.195 release, click here.

QuickStart Engine Forums, and SourceForge source repository

* You may have noticed the forums here are kind of quiet. We use a different site for our forums. Here is the URL: http://xnaquickstart.freeforums.org/portal.php.
* If you'd like to get the latest code that is in development between releases, our repository is at sourceforge, this URL has all the info you'll need: http://xnaquickstart.freeforums.org/get-the-latest-code-t73.html. Currently sourceforge is only updated to v0.195.

This is an intermediate release until we can release v0.2. v0.19 was released just to show the new framework of the engine for the first time. Now we're trying to make it easier to use, and more powerful.

In order to use this version you will need:

• Visual Studio 2005 with C# (Express version will be sufficient)
• XNA Framework, version 3.0

• For Xbox360 development:
  • NVidia PhysX Driver http://www.ageia.com/drivers/drivers.html. You do not need an Nvidia video card or PhysX card to use PhysX, but you will not get hardware physics acceleration through PhysX without them.

In order to develop on the physics implementation you will also need

• Visual Studio 2005 with C
• NVidia PhysX SDK (only for Xbox360 development, unless you want to use PhysX with Windows).