My reasons are many, but much of the background information and research I have done on the topic is well summed up in Linus Torvalds’ talk at Google.

All of the tags in the svn repository have already been updated (except #8) so if you want to get an early look at the changes feel free to check out a copy from http://code.google.com/p/hmengine-xna/

I’m thinking hard about getting another tutorial out the door for the 4.0 release. The two previous ones I was attempting to get going have become a big complicated mess and not something I’d really feel comfortable trying to release as a tutorial (it’s more like a paper for a big graphics conference or something…) so I’ll keep thinking and see if I can’t come up with something that fits well into the tutorial format and maybe takes advantage of some new features in the 4.0 API.

On a somewhat related note, I got one of those new XBox 360 250GB editions, and it really is as whisper quiet as they have been advertising.

• nookBrowser – a simple browser application
• nookLibrary – a replacement for the “my library” application that has more sorting and search options
• trook – a free ebook downloader, feed reader, and application installer (these will be made into individual apps soon)

All in all things are moving along pretty fast. I have not done much of the major coding yet but have taken over a large part of the standardization and integration of the separate projects. I’m hoping to get more directly involved in coding some things now that i have everything in a more easily accessible setup for people new to nook development (which is pretty much everyone right now)

The only shortfall for me (who does most of my graphics development in DirectX technologies) is that because Android is Linux based, it only handles OpenGL, although the SDK does have some pretty easy quick hooks into the API so I may have to branch out a bit. We’ll see where it goes.

At the moment, I am working on an HMMultitouchDevice that can be added to the engine like all the other devices (mouse, keyboard, and gamepads) that just works out of the box with the engine. This whole project has been given the name “PufferFish”, which was a totally random title thrown out into the #xna channel immediately upon my asking for a good name from the folks in there and it just kind of stuck.

The device is currently taking touch inputs and just rendering spots on the screen where the touch would correspond to. Event wiring will be happening next, but I am playing around with some rendering of the spots (circles around fingers etc.) first just for a bit of fun. As soon as I can get some videos of the project in action I’ll get them up here. That’s all for now.

To keep a long story short, I refactored the components a bit and now have an HMComponentManager that keeps lists of anything that is updatable, renderable, loadable etc. just like the HMObjectManager used to do, but it also includes the ability to add input devices and cameras as well (basically everything in the engine is a child of some IHMComponent or another).

Since these changes are pretty important and add a lot of flexibility to the items we can create and use in the engine. I will be updating the tutorials to accommodate the differences that have been introduced. This will probably take a little while, as I want to release the full set of changes all at once, but the final outcome will overall be a much better put together framework.

Once there is some progress in the actual software side of things, I’ll post some videos of some interaction with the table itself. Until then here are the teaser pics

You can see the IR filter that gets replaced here

The lenses from this will help keep the table shorter

Here is a shot my dad sent of the finished tabletop

There have also been a few minor architectural changes making the different managers (shaders, objects, input etc.) into GameComponents and DrawableGameComponents – which I have been thinking about doing for a while – that drastically simplified the Game class itself.

Take a look at the new setup and let me know what you all think in the forums.

The projects in svn will now require Visual Studio 2008 to be run, and some parts of the code use features available only in C# 3.0, but any of these that your compiler doesn’t support should be fairly easy to write in a C# 2.0 manner.

Here is a video of the current state of things. I start the demo out with half of the sphere scaled outwards from the center just to give the body something to fix when I start the update cycle. You can easily see the accuracy in the waves moving through the body and how far it has come in only a couple of days of work.