A few days ago I uploaded the final build of my Atari 2600’s River Raid clone to CodePlex and because it’s based on Neat game engine, I updated the Neat project as well. You can read more about the River Raid X project in its own page, so I’ll just talk about the new features of Neat in this new release right now.

It has been a slow year and I didn’t have much time to work on games, so there aren’t that many new features in the new release of Neat Engine, however the code is much more polished and stable. Some of the new additions to Neat Engine are:

• A simple 2D physics simulator that can be easily used in regular platformers and other simple 2D games. It uses Neat’s own polygon class and collision detection mechanism.
• Sprite sheets support: Now you don’t have to create a new texture file for each of your sprites. Sprite sheets can increase your game’s performance significantly. New geometry and math helper functions such as Line Segment/Line Segment intersection detection, Point on line detection, etc.
• A more functional auto complete mechanism in the Console.
• Draw functions for LineBrush class.
• Windows and Containers in the GUI system, plus new events for controls such as Move, Resize, Focused, etc.
• The ability to load regular image files directly via scripts without using the Content Manager.

I am working on adding Kinect support to Neat using the official Kinect SDK. If you are interested in playing with a Kinect-compatible Neat Engine, you can download the latest version of the source code from the Source Code page of the project on CodePlex.

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