March, 2007

Gamepad thumbsticks return floating point values ranging from -1 to 1. It can be tempting to hook these inputs directly up to your physics, writing code like: turn += gamepad.ThumbSticks.Left.X * turnRate; But wait! Are you sure this is really what...

Actually I can't think of a single thing wrong with mouse hardware, but it seemed like a good idea to complete my trilogy of input device complaints :-)

Gamepads, like keyboards , are not perfect. They are designed to be cheap, sturdy, and nice to hold: accuracy comes second. Specifically, the analog thumbsticks are not very precise at reporting their absolute position (although they are good at measuring...

I'm not a hardware guy, but if I had to design a keyboard I'd probably include some kind of electrical switch under each key, with a set of wires leading to and from each switch so I could detect when they were pressed. Bzzzt, wrong! Real hardware designers...

Once upon a time I used to program in Perl. There, I admitted it! My dirty secret is out :-) Perl is an odd language, and there are plenty of things not to like about it, but one thing I did like is how it is designed to let you choose your own coding...

Thomas Aylesworth writes about the difference between optimizing your design versus implementation , and the importance of of the Big O.

Performance never ceases to be a fascinating topic. This forum thread inspired Eli to write about foreach and the garbage collector , and also got me thinking about an ancient debate between the merits of multiplication and shifting. Join me as we travel...

I'm a bad person. I said I was going to talk about transitions , and I meant it at the time. But then I got all excited about the launch of the new XNA website, so I took some time to talk about the stuff there first. Today I sat down to start writing...

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a pub with some friends, examining spilt beer on a rickety wooden table and discussing how many layers of multitexturing it would take to render such a thing? While driving on the freeway, did you ever find yourself...

Last night I attended an incandescent performance by Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble . In the middle of a particularly flamboyant piece of tabla virtuosity, I found myself thinking about the similarities between musical rhythms and game timing. Even...

ContentManager.ReadAsset is a new function coming in the next version of the XNA Framework . What is it for, and why should you care? You almost certainly don't care. In fact you should probably stop reading this blog post right now. ReadAsset is for...

The next release of the XNA Framework won't add anything dramatically new to the content pipeline, but includes a lot of tweaks and bugfixes that didn't make it in time for our first version. This update is mostly about polishing what we already shipped...

The Sprite Effects sample uses this picture of my cat Rhys : I needed an alpha channel to mask out the cat and remove the couch from the background: a common requirement when fixing up photos for use in games. The first step is to use whatever kind of...

The Generated Geometry sample program uses two textures, sky.bmp: and rocks.bmp: Both started out as photographs taken near Paradise on the south side of Mount Rainier. Here are the originals: Original sky photo Original rocks photo To use these as textures...

I know I said I was going to write about transition effects, and I promise I will, but I decided to talk about something else first, for reasons that may later become apparent. I'm a programmer. I cannot draw. Not even if my life depended on it. If...

Today we announced the five winning games from the Dream-Build-Play warm up competition. I have to admit being a little nervous as to what this was going to turn up. With only a couple of weeks development time, plus the restriction of having to...

Dean Calver has a version of Lua running on Xbox using XNA GSE . I'm a big fan of unusual programming languages. I love encountering different ways of thinking about coding problems, and find that the more varied languages I learn, the better a programmer...

The first commercial game I ever worked on was Extreme G on the Nintendo 64. While I was writing the menu system, the lead artist, a grizzled young man named Johnny Christmas, gave me a piece of advice I never forgot. "Listen here, young lad", quoth he...