August, 2010

People, like cats and magpies, are instinctively fascinated by shiny things. In reality specular light and environment reflections are usually quite subtle, but car showrooms and jewelry stores are full of spotlights for a good reason! Salespeople long...

I predict that DualTextureEffect will turn out to be the secret weapon in the armory of all the best looking Windows Phone games. It is efficient (only 7 vertex and 6 pixel shader instructions when not using fog), yet enables visually lush rendering techniques...

Popular XNA myth #623: " XNA forces me to use the Content Pipeline any time I want to load data into my game ". Short Answer Not true! The Content Pipeline is (almost) entirely optional. If you prefer to do things some other way, you are most...

Want to see how we implemented the five built-in effects (BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, and AlphaTestEffect) in Game Studio 4.0? Curious what the default SpriteBatch shader looks like? Want to customize these shaders...

I just noticed that Bob Taco (of creators.xna.com forum fame ) has a blog with some great XNA related content …