Extending XNA game development with XNA Magic

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Opening their website just a couple of days ago, XNA Magic offers a preview of a yet another video game development platform, building on top of the Microsoft’s XNA framework. In concept, it is similar to the Torque X engine. Though the XNA Magic’s focus appears to be full out 3D worlds and effects.

The list of features seems impressive:

• Animated Models – “XNA Magic supports bone hierarchy based animation as a standard feature.”
• BSP Maps – “XNA Magic has built-in support for the Quake 3 BSP map file format.”
• Community – “fully integrate the community website by allowing access to community assets, projects and tutorials from within the design enviornment.” (Sounds much more useful than the Great Games Experiment network)
• Dynamics – “Simulated properties include position and orientation, linear and angular momentum, friction and damping. Static forces such as gravity and collision geometry can easily be specified at the scene level.”
• Galleries – “The XNA Magic development environment provides easy to use gallery based editors.” Meaning to say presets available to objects and environments.
• Object Model – “The object model is fully scriptable and provides a rich API that allows many services to the application programmer.”
• Particle Systems – “By visually connecting components in the graph editor you can easily create stunning particle systems in a matter of minutes.”
• Post Processing – “Add amazing effects like motion blur, bloom or depth of field from the built-in library or use HLSL to create your own.”
  
• Scene Designer – “Place models, lights, cameras and other scene items using convenient and familiar WYSIWYG manipulation tools.”
• Scripting – Object or Class level C# behaviour scripting.
• Shaders – “XNA Magic development environment provides a great HLSL editor for editing your shader code.” A number of pre-made effects are included out of the box.
• Shadows – simply “select the lights and objects that will cast shadows and enable shadow casting.”
• Terrain and Sky – “Adding terrain to your scene is simply a matter of specifying one or more height-field textures, choosing detail texture maps as needed and setting common properties such as fog color and distance.”
• Vector Fonts – “The development environment allows any Truetype fonts to be converted into light-weight geometry.”