Manders vs. Machine

I've updated my RoundLine code to work with the latest version of XNA Game Studio (4.0). Check it out on CodePlex . Enjoy! -Mike

The February 2010 DirectX SDK was released just moments ago. In this release, PIX for Windows has been updated with much fuller support for Direct3D 11 analysis. If you're using Direct3D 11, you'll definitely want to pick up this version of the DXSDK...

I've been wanting to find a better way to get 2D geometry content into my XNA Game Studio projects. Laying out lines and triangles on graph paper, then entering coordinates by hand into code files gets old fast! I was looking for a 2D illustration package...

Since there still seems to be a lot of interest in it, I've updated my RoundLine code and released it on CodePlex . Here are the major changes from earlier versions: Updated for XNA Game Studio 3.0 Uses shader instancing for improved performance...

The August 2008 DirectX SDK has been released. You can get it here . Here are the PIX updates, as listed on the official " What's New " summary for the Aug08 release. PIX Improvements This release of PIX has many significant improvements....

I've been working on a little arcade game to submit to the XNA Creators Club Community Games Beta. I finally finished it last weekend and submitted it Sunday night. It passed Peer Review and went live a few hours ago -- woohoo! It's not the most amazing...

Now that I've got the hang of quickly drawing lots of shapes with shader instancing , what should I draw? All that geometric repetition got me thinking about the artwork of M. C. Escher , which led me to this page about regular and semi-regular tessellation...

I haven't written anything about PIX in a while . But here's a great article written by Brian Richardson at GarageGames about using PIX to track down a rendering issue. Nice job, Brian! You can find the latest version of PIX in the March 2008 DirectX...

A lot of my XNA -based programs draw many instances of the same mesh (such as RoundLines ), with each instance having different position, rotation, etc. I had been submitting these meshes to Direct3D one instance at a time, which is not great for performance...

(Insert standard gosh-I-haven't-blogged-in-a-while blurb here) (UPDATE: If you get an out-of-video-memory exception when starting the program, find the line of code that says "public const int numNodesToAllocate = 250;" and change 250 to a smaller...

Two people recently sent me questions about setting up the world/view/projection matrices to work with my XNA RoundLine code. All of my programs so far have specified line coordinates in an abstract world coordinate space, with a view matrix based on...

The discs of light used by my XNA 2D lighting code look decent, but shadows would really add to the realism. Shadows are a bit tricky because they are non-local: an object half-way across the screen can make the difference in whether a pixel should be...

I've been playing with 2D lighting lately so I can add it to my XNA maze game . Lighting in computer graphics, I think it's fair to say, is always a bit of a hack -- a matter of finding some middle ground between the (incredibly rich and complex) way...

Man, I totally jinxed myself when I predicted that hooking up my RoundLine collision detection / sliding code to my XNA maze game wouldn't be painful. It was. But after a lot of hours of debugging, I've got it working well enough to call done and usable...

I think I've got it! After a couple hours of head-scratching and geometry, my XNA code to handle collision between a disc and a RoundLine is looking correct -- at least in my test app. Soon my maze game will be a bit more challenging, since the walls...

The next thing I want to add to my XNA maze game is collision detection, so my little orange disc can't go right through the maze walls. There seem to be two alternate general approaches that can be taken regarding collision detection: After reading...

One natural fit for my XNA line drawing code is a maze game, since mazes consist of lots of thick lines, and they are easy to generate programmatically. So I had a look at some maze generation algorithms , decided to try the simple depth-first algorithm...

I've updated my Microbe Patrol XNA project to build for both Windows and the Xbox 360. I didn't make any other changes to the game, so if you don't have an Xbox 360 and a Creator's Club subscription, you might not find it worthwhile to upgrade to this...

I'm finally done writing an XNA game called "Microbe Patrol" based on the Microbes sample I wrote and blogged about, around a month ago. I think it turned into a fairly fun, original, good-looking game. The basic concept of the game is to create trails...

There are some nice texture-based solutions out there for drawing text in XNA. I've used the font code in XNAExtras a couple times, and it works fine. There's another font utility on Ziggyware that looks nice, and I believe there are others too. There...

I've written some helper code to draw nice-looking 2D line segments with decent performance in XNA -- perhaps you will find it useful in your own projects. These lines have several advantages over using hardcoded images or standard Direct3D lines: ...

I was playing around with particle behavior algorithms using XNA and came up with an app that's fun to play with, so I thought I'd share it. Getting code ready to post on my blog forces me to simplify it and clean it up, kind of like having to clean the...

For those interested in game development technology, it’s been a great week of product releases! Monday we saw the 1.0 release of XNA Game Studio Express . Wednesday brought the release of the December 2006 version of the DirectX SDK , which includes...

One thing that surprised me (in retrospect) about my last sample was that it doesn't make a single reference to a Matrix. All my other apps use tons of matrices. It's hard to do much in 3D graphics without them. Even if you're writing 2D programs with...

I had heard that XNA does render-to-texture a bit differently from native DirectX , so I spent some time playing with that part of the API tonight. Not surprisingly, it was designed in a nice clean manner and it was a snap to use. In case you're not...