Shawn Hargreaves: jwatte:Achievement Unlocked: Developed your first game  ;)I'm ALL for that!I believe we looked into doing that, actually. I don't know, I consider seeing my game running on my 360 achievement enough for me!Tom

MattHenleyXNA:I would rather give the player an unlockable such as new characters or weapons when they accomplish. People say achievments give a game more replayability, wouldn't getting a brand new weapon, better than the last make you want to play some more?That's the best point I've seen yet in this thread.  Achievements are cool, I like ...

Hey, that's pretty sweet!  I must have missed that post on Ziggy's site.  Thanks for the link, Catalin. Tom  

I have an A* implementation in XNA on my blog if that will help. Tom

BTW, you may also want to check out this thread that has information about other 2D tile map editors.  I used Tile Studio because it was all I could find at the time.  It met my needs but I'm not completely happy with it, so you should check out some of the others too to decide what you like best. Tom

Sorry for the delay in getting this to you.  Since it may be of use to others as well, I'm going to go ahead and post it rather than email it. ; --------------------------------------------------------; Tile Studio Script for XNA Tile Engine Component; from www.xnaresources.com; --------------------------------------------------------#file ...

For information on how to use a profiler to find performance problems, check out my blog article on the subject.  Like Zman says, and you found out first-hand, changes that would seem to make obvious performance improvements frequently don't.  The only way to know for sure is to profile. Tom

Good stuff!  I'm disappointed to learn that Night of the Puppets is on hold, though.  I've been wanting to play it since you first announced it during DBP. Tom

XNA doesn't have any direct support for tile maps so you'll have to write an importer or loader for whatever map format you use. Tile Studio is a freeware program for creating 2D maps with tilesets.  It's not perfect but it does everything you need and the price is right!  ;-)  Another nice thing about it is that you can write your ...

Ctek has a nice-looking Linux-based product with their Axis System-on-a-Chip solution.  We're evaluating that now and the guy doing it is interested in seeing if he can get Mono running on it. The embedded world used to be strictly proprietary OSes, with VxWorks being the closest thing to a ''standard'' that existed, but it ...