July, 2010

When you create a Windows Phone game project, XNA defaults to Reach profile . When you create a Windows or Xbox 360 project, it defaults to HiDef. But it is also possible to target Reach from a Windows or Xbox game! There are two reasons you might want...

So, the XNA 4.0 beta is available for your downloading delight . Nick has a great article about the new touch gestures API . In other notes: HiDef is now fully implemented on Windows Profile validation is now implemented, so if you try to do HiDef stuff...

The Windows Phone version of the XNA Framework includes an automatic rotation feature. This allows XNA games to choose whether they want to run in landscape or portrait mode, without having to roll their own rotation solution like we used to on Zune ...

Windows Phone includes a hardware image scaler. This allows XNA games to choose what backbuffer resolution they want to draw to, regardless of the physical screen size. You draw at whatever size you like, then the scaler adjusts the resulting image to...

If you ever tried to implement high dynamic range (HDR) rendering,  you probably noticed a few things: HDR requires a rendertarget format with more than 8 bit precision If you want to draw anything interesting, this format needs to support alpha...

Rendertarget formats are one of the few things Game Studio 4.0 allows to vary across different platforms and hardware, even within a single graphics profile .   How it works Anywhere you specify a backbuffer or rendertarget format, or a depth/stencil...

This seemingly innocuous code: device.SetVertexBuffer(vb); device.Draw(...); device.SetVertexBuffer( null ); vb.SetData(...); is the sort of thing that makes graphics driver writers wake in the night, heart pounding, drenched in sweat. Verily...

XNA Game Studio 4.0 and PIX for Windows have an unfortunate incompatibility. If you take a PIX capture of a GS4 app using default PIX settings, you will get this error: Target Program Unexpected Exit The program 'foo.exe' exited unexpectedly while PIX...

Robin Debreuil announces an interesting looking project which converts Flash (.swf) graphics into a format that can be rendered using XNA.