Has XENA Died??!

Hell no! XENA is pretty much alive and kicking, however we have been overwhelmed with new design decisions and ideas to create a killer game engine.

We have decided to make XENA "The Game Engine Of Options", many pre-built functions in XENA can be done in multiple ways, Don't like a boring old "Sky box"? (Six cubes with various textures) use a "Sky Dome" complete with fluffy cloud systems and weather effects, throw in a prebuilt XENA rain effect, or make your own rain using C# and the XENA Particle system, alternativly you could always resort to the XENA Particle Language Files to define your own.

We are cruising ahead to a version 0.3, and one step closer to a "public release-to-play version".

The following list, highlights the next list of features being added/ or has been added into the XENA 0.3 build.

- NEW: Particle Engine - Multiple emission types and modifiers. Such as spray, circle emissions
etc and Colour & Scale modifiers to name a few.

- NEW: Pre-Built particle effects - Rain, Snow, Blood spray

- NEW: Sky Domes, Sky Box environment views

- NEW: Screen Resolution Manager - allows you to restrict or offer many choices for resolutions
and screen formats (16 bit) refresh rates, etc. This
can be done through the screen resolution filter, or by
retrieving all supported video modes from the graphics
adapter using the easy
"GetAllSupportedVideoModes(GraphicsAdapter adapter)"
Method. Yes, you can even filter on the supported Video
Modes within the Code.

- NEW: Definition files can be encrypted or decrypted - (Post coming soon about XENA Def files)

- NEW: An advanced font engine, as opposed to the standard XENA Font engine, this engine
allows for in code font manipulation, much like the particle
engine, developers can change the colour of a particular letter
in the text, or scroll the text through use of modifiers (Oh... and if you're curious, the advanced font engine, runs on the same technology as the advanced sprite batch detailed below... So yes... even your text can have per pixel shading properties ;) )

- NEW: Advanced Sprite Batch - This is an extension of the current standard XNA Sprite Batch,
This sprite batch allows for per pixel shader language
alterations. Cool shader level effects, are now possible per
pixel of the 2D Texture.

- NEW: XENA Sound Engine - allowing the developer standard sound bank functionality with
XNA sound functions, BUT with even more functionality, don't
like the wave sound banks in XNA?. Xena allows playback of
OGG, and MP3 too, so no more huge sound files!

above is the list for release 0.3, so as you can see, its been a very busy month or two... The list above could still have more added to it, so I will keep you posted.