I’ve started work again on the Shader Series of XNA Creators Club samples. I left off with Shader Series 4: Materials and Lights. I’m working on the documentation for my next sample now, in which I show multiple pass (additive) opaque lighting. It’s another...

Hello, for anyone looking at my recent posts on game design, there will be a bit of a delay before the next one. It has nothing to do with the content -- I'm going through a bit of a family emergency right now. My polan was to post a discussion Domain...

Yesterday I listed the domains for the design model; today I'll list what they're used for. In later updates I'll post more specifics on these uses, but for now, I’d just like to scope things. This list is not final, and there are probably additions as...

I’m treating the Domain Model for Game Design like an unproven scientific theory. The Academy of Arts and Sciences states that a theory must have two properties: 1. It must be an explanation of a feature supported by experimentation 2. It must be...

River’s End is mostly complete. It’s not much of a game, but it is a very relaxing experience. It just needs some polish, a few new graphics systems, and a little more content and it’ll be ready to go. However, I don’t know yet how or if I can distribute...

I’m back from GameFest 2007 and I can start to take back parts of my life. The last 3 months have possibly been the busiest and most stressful of my entire life. The rewards have been incredible though, and I’m still glowing about the fantastic reception...

Apologies for the lack of updates, it's been a crazy month. Even with all the madness of work, I have had some spare time to work on my private game project. I've been using this to keep my game-dev/c# skills sharp as well as to "feel the pain" of my...

Despite my lack of posting, work on my ambient game continues. I'm working 60 to 90 hour weeks these days so I don't have a lot of free time for things like blogging, games, or sleep. Anyways, here's an updated screenshot from the game, complete with...

In this update on River's End (previously Rox 3D), I'll be talking about the process by which I arrived at a lighting model for the paper lanterns that feature prominently in my new game. Early on, I decided I wanted to blur the line between realism...

I have a very limited amount of free time these days, so the total time to date working on this project has been less than 25 hours. However, I'm very happy with the results so far, and I'm very excited to get all of the new game mechanics implemented...

Greetings from GDC! My involvement has been pretty low key so far, so I’ve had a little time to dedicate to my test game. I’m using this game as both a learning experience, and as a test application to try various performance techniques and API features...

I update this blog so infrequently it’s somewhat embarrassing, but I finally think I have something to talk about. I wanted an informal chronicle of a very simple game I’m working on based off of source and assets from XNA Game Studio Express documentation...

I see this coming up on the XNA forums a lot, and I wanted to fire out my recommendation. First, I find enabling unmanaged debug spew in VS is pretty slow. I'm also a multi-mon fanatic, trying to chain as many monitors as I can to a single PC. So I like...

The beta version of the MDX 1.1 to XNA Framework Migration Guide is now available. Sorry in advance about the formatting, after all, this is beta! I wanted to get something into our existing MDX developers' hands so they could rapidly move thier code...

The XNA Games Studio Express beta is available. It's not a complete representation of the final Games Studio Express functionality, but it's a good way to get acquainted with the style of the thing. There's a lot to go over, even for Managed DirectX...

Before I say anything else, I want to address the topic of my book. Yes, it is on Indefinite Hold, at least with me at the helm. The reasons were many-fold, but the primary reason is that MDX 2.0 never shipped. The API on which I'd based my entire book is deprecated, which obviously made the book somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps someday I'll return to it and finish what I started, using a technology that might be called MDX's Conspicuous Successor....

I suppose we all get to do this once in a while. I need to rant and this seems as good as place as any. Allow me to regale you with my tale of woe (such as it is) and you may ignore it at your leisure. Tonight I decided it was high time I started playing...

Well, looks like Tom 's managed to find something that works far, far better than the loop I presented in my last post. After my last couple entries, we'd had some feedback from some internal developers who have been using MDX in their own projects. One...

I discovered something this weekend while playing around with the game loop I outlined in my post last week. Seems I completely misread the function of SendNotifyMessage and was using it in place of PostMessage. However, if SendNotifyMessage works similarly to SendMessage when used on the same thread, why was I not getting a stack overflow exception like I would have received with SendMessage?...

I thought I'd take a break from my book to talk about some of the trickier points of using System.Windows.Forms for gaming. If you read Tom Miller s's blog, you've probably seen him address similar issues in his lengthy discussions on game loops in Managed...

Well, it seems the book that sites like Barnes & Noble have listed under my current ISBN are using information outdated by over a year. I'll take to my publisher ASAP to get that worked out. In the meantime, here's the book info: Managed DirectX Game...

Thanks to everyone who participated in today's Gaming in .Net developer chat. The transcript of the chat will be posted here: http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/canada/chats/transcripts/default.aspx I'd also like to apologize, I don't think I actually ever...

Tom Miller has posted some new information about the future of Managed DirectX . I suggest anyone interested in the subject take a read, since it would change a lot of the public interfaces for the runtime. Visual Studio 2005 is going to give us some...

How descriptive should a variable name be (and when should you abbreviate)? This entry on internal naming convention in C# presents one of the more esoteric elements of stylistic convention. When is it appropriate to abbreviate, and when is it appropriate...

I want to thank everyone for their feedback on my style guide for internal variables. I'll be adding your feedback to the posts to fill out those sections that I may have understated. I'm getting a lot of great criticism and additions -- if you happen...