November, 2010

You are making a WinForms app. All is going well, until one day your custom control disappears. In its place you just see a big red cross: What gives? Let us back up to remind ourselves how exceptions work: If your code does something wrong (such as dereferencing...

Compressed data is a great thing, especially when the GPU hardware is able to decompress it for free while rendering . But what exactly does vertex data compression mean, and how do we enable it? XNA defaults to 32 bit floating point for most vertex data...

Consider the flow of data through a typical game: Customer downloads game from Marketplace Game data is stored in the filesystem Game loads the data Data is stored in memory CPU or GPU fetches data from memory CPU or GPU does awesome...

Back in 2004 I wrote an article for a book called ShaderX3 about how to tackle the shader permutation problem by automatically generating shaders from combinations of smaller code fragments. Now Tim has created an XNA 4.0 implementation of this same...

I have a theory that agonizing over difficult decisions is always a waste of time. To decide between two or more options, we must predict how good an outcome each choice will produce. Decisions are only difficult when this is an approximate estimate,...

I find it fascinating to watch how different programmers tackle problems in different ways. Some like to think things through until they fully understand the optimal solution, then code it up in one quick burst. Others prefer to get something up and running...

PDC talks are now available to download in WMV or MP4 format, as well as for online streaming. Mine is here :

Goodness from Stephen . (more info about it here )