The DirectX Tool Kit ( DirectXTK ) has been updated with the addition of a SpriteFont implementation, similar to the one in XNA. Get it here: DirectXTK.zip Shamelessly plagiarizing the readme file : This is a native D3D11 implementation of a bitmap font...

I often find myself writing little throwaway utilities to help with other tasks, and many of these utilities need to parse command lines.  There are myriad ways to do this in C#, ranging from the quick and dirty to the infinitely flexible and confusing...

The WinRT programming environment, which is used to create Metro applications for Windows 8, replaces the old Win32 threading APIs such as CreateThread with a new ThreadPool::RunAsync API. This is generally a good thing (ThreadPool is better than CreateThread...

Over the Christmas break I spent some time porting the built-in XNA effects (BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, etc.) to native C++ using Direct3D 11. Finding that strangely enjoyable, I went on to make a C++ version of SpriteBatch, and also ported the XNA Primitives...

Ok, silliness aside , is it possible to implement an efficient bloom effect on Windows Phone without custom shaders? Bloom consists of three operations: Identify which parts of the image should be bloomed Blur those parts Combine blurred bloomy bits with...

Thanks for the comments about what I should write about next .  Hopefully I managed to count these more accurately than the Iowa Republican party   :-) C++ 16 How GPU’s work 11 3D math 10 Game design 10 SIMD optimization 3 Of course my blog...

Time for some end-of-year silliness... Inspired by this recent Twitter exchange: Scionwest - @shawnhargreaves @nickgravelyn How about post processing for WP7? I've seen people do Bloom effects and thought P.P. was not part of WP7? nickgravelyn - @Scionwest...

I have a couple more articles planned about aliasing and motion blur, but am curious to hear where you would like me to take this blog next. Some topics I am considering: C++ .  Dirty secret: although I've mostly blogged about C# programming, much...

After six years working on XNA, I decided it was time to take on a new challenge.  I am moving to the Windows Phone team, where I will be working on things I'm not sure how much I can say about here  (leaking future business plans on MSDN might...

Game player:  " d00d, teh framerate totally sux0rz! " Game developer:  " we are experiencing aliasing due to low sampling frequency along the temporal axis... " One of the many decisions that goes into making a game is whether...

So far I have written about aliasing in the context of rendering single images, but neglected to consider what happens when we string a series of images together, attempting to create the illusion of smooth motion.  Animation introduces the temporal...

Looking through my backlog of half written articles, I realized I have a couple more topics in my series about antialiasing , which I had entirely forgotten about!  Oops... Actually, though, today is a good day to finish this article.  Forget...

What a sad month for those of us who program computers. Take a moment to reflect on this paper , published in April 1960: No provision need be made for the user to program the return of registers to the free-storage list. This return takes place automatically...

A simple test Load the Silverlight 5 port of the XNA bloom sample (which you can find in c:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft SDKs/Silverlight/v5.0/Toolkit/Sep11/Source/Sample source code.zip/Xna after installing the Silverlight toolkit).  Run it, and...

One thing missing from the new 3D functionality in Silverlight 5 is an equivalent of the XNA Game class.  I previously wrote about how to provide XNA style Update and Draw methods in a WinForms environment .  What is the Silverlight equivalent...

Could this be the first ever 3D Silverlight game? My colleague Ito ported the rail shooter that he originally wrote for AppWeek 2010 to use the new 3D features in Silverlight 5 .  First get the SL5 RC plugin (if you don't have it already). ...

I have been remiss in not mentioning this on my blog before, but if you are an XNA developer who hasn't been paying attention to Silverlight 5, now might be a good time to start! A quick history: At the MIX11 conference in April, we announced...

(shamelessly stealing the title of a post by my colleague Aaron) In fact, why don't I let him provide the content as well as title: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2011/07/07/10184338.aspx

Recent silence notwithstanding, I'm still here, and will have more to say about aliasing as soon as I find myself less busy! In the meantime, check out this latest App Hub release:  http://create.msdn.com/en-US/sample/xnb_format This article documents...

My colleague Reza recently started a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rezanour .  He already has some good posts about vector math, and is a smart guy so I'm betting will be writing many interesting things in the future :-)

Back when multisampling first showed up, GPU hardware was slow, so triangle counts were low.  Complex curved shapes were approximated by a small number of faceted triangles, each of which was big enough to cover many screen pixels. This created an...

Alpha cutouts (where you use the alpha channel of a texture to determine the shape of a sprite or billboard) are the cause of many an aliasing problem. There are basically two ways to do alpha cutouts, both tragically flawed.   Alpha blended cutouts...

This is almost too obvious to be worth pointing out, but no amount of clever tricks like bilinear filtering and mipmapping will help if your input data is itself already aliased! Yet the example texture used in my previous post had nasty pixelization...

Aliasing can occur any time you resample a texture , for instance to scale it, rotate it, or map it onto a 3D model. Thanks to our friend the Nyquist threshold , the resulting problems get worse the lower a frequency you sample at, ie. the smaller you...

Multisampling is a compromise for people who really want to use supersampling , but can't afford it. The idea is simple: instead of increasing the resolution for all rendering, what if we do triangle rasterization and depth/stencil tests at the higher...