September, 2008

All network games need to send data from one machine to another. To make sense of this data, it is important to know which player it refers to. For peer-to-peer games, this is trivial. When you call LocalNetworkGamer.ReceiveData, you get an output parameter...

Dear Reader, I have another question for you... I sometimes notice people using samples from creators.xna.com , having trouble with them, but not realizing their problem is answered in the sample doc. The first time this happened, I could dismiss it as...

Dear Reader, I have a question for you... I am frequently amazed when smart developers ask questions about performance problems, but then it turns out they haven't so much as tried a profiling tool on it. I'm curious to understand why this is, and if...

One of the less obvious changes in our 3.0 release is that we picked up an updated version of the FBX SDK from our partners at Autodesk, which enables some cool new functionality in our FBX importer: Multiple textures Multiple texture coordinate channels...

A neat feature of Xbox LIVE is how you can go into your friends list and see what everyone is currently doing. The details page for one of my friends might show something like this: Microsoft Cat Simulator 2008 Kitty Herding Mode Level 3, Score 15 Online...

One of my favorite Xbox LIVE features is how you can go into your friends list, see what game people are playing, then join their current network session with just a couple of button presses. Or you can send an invite to a friend, asking them to come...

Stephen offers a useful tidbit about how to stop those annoying " The thread xxx has exited with code 0 (0x0) " messages appearing in your debugger output window. I was SO happy when I learned you could do this.

All Xbox LIVE Community Games are required to provide a trial mode, so people can play the game for a while before deciding if they want to purchase it. You have several choices as to how much time you want to spend implementing this.   Do Nothing...

Huzzah! The talks from GameFest 2008 are up on MSDN . Among this veritable cornucopia of goodies, you will find two talks from yours truly, Networking, Traffic Jams, and Schrödinger's Cat and Building Worlds with the Content Pipeline . Eli spoke...