Manders vs. Machine
A blog about PIX, XNA, and other game programming stuff
RoundLine Code Updated for XNA 4.0
I've updated my RoundLine code to work with the latest version of XNA Game Studio (4.0). Check it...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 02/09/2011
The February 2010 DirectX SDK is available!
The February 2010 DirectX SDK was released just moments ago. In this release, PIX for Windows has...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 02/05/2010
XNA RoundLine Code Released on CodePlex
Since there still seems to be a lot of interest in it, I've updated my RoundLine code and released...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 03/14/2009
Check out the August 2008 version of PIX
The August 2008 DirectX SDK has been released. You can get it here. Here are the PIX updates, as...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 08/11/2008
My First XNA Community Game
I've been working on a little arcade game to submit to the XNA Creators Club Community Games Beta. I...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 06/25/2008
Debugging with PIX for Windows
I haven't written anything about PIX in a while. But here's a great article written by Brian...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 04/08/2008
It's full of stars: XNA 2-D Shader Instancing
A lot of my XNA-based programs draw many instances of the same mesh (such as RoundLines), with each...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 04/07/2008
Wendybrot Revisited: A Better XNA Mandelbrot Set Explorer
(Insert standard gosh-I-haven't-blogged-in-a-while blurb here) (UPDATE: If you get an...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 03/20/2008
XNA RoundLines in Pixel Coordinate Space
Two people recently sent me questions about setting up the world/view/projection matrices to work...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 05/28/2007
Shadows in 2D
The discs of light used by my XNA 2D lighting code look decent, but shadows would really add to the...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 03/14/2007
BentMaze 1.2: Lights Out!
I've been playing with 2D lighting lately so I can add it to my XNA maze game. Lighting in computer...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 03/08/2007
BentMaze 1.1: Collide and slide
Man, I totally jinxed myself when I predicted that hooking up my RoundLine collision detection /...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 02/26/2007
Collision and wall sliding on a RoundLine
I think I've got it! After a couple hours of head-scratching and geometry, my XNA code to handle...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 02/09/2007
BentMaze 1.0: A jittered maze and radial culling
One natural fit for my XNA line drawing code is a maze game, since mazes consist of lots of thick...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 01/31/2007
Microbe Patrol 1.1: Xbox 360 support
I've updated my Microbe Patrol XNA project to build for both Windows and the Xbox 360. I didn't make...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 01/25/2007
Microbe Patrol 1.0: An actual XNA game, finally
I'm finally done writing an XNA game called "Microbe Patrol" based on the Microbes sample I wrote...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 01/15/2007
Stroke-based text rendering in XNA
There are some nice texture-based solutions out there for drawing text in XNA. I've used the font...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 01/12/2007
Lines: 2D, thick, rounded line segments for XNA programs
I've written some helper code to draw nice-looking 2D line segments with decent performance in XNA...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 01/07/2007
Microbes: emergent behavior and "fake" antialiasing with XNA
I was playing around with particle behavior algorithms using XNA and came up with an app that's fun...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 12/19/2006
A painless introduction to PIX for Windows
For those interested in game development technology, it’s been a great week of product releases!...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 12/15/2006
MikeMatrixVisualizer: A VS debugger visualizer for XNA Matrices
One thing that surprised me (in retrospect) about my last sample was that it doesn't make a single...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 12/04/2006
Feedback: Creating chaos with render-to-texture
I had heard that XNA does render-to-texture a bit differently from native DirectX, so I spent some...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 11/30/2006
A helper class to show video "safe areas"
In this brave new world of XNA, we need to think about how our programs will look when displayed on...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 11/29/2006
Wendybrot 1.1: Faster, more support, cleaner code
I didn't intend to post an update to my XNA-based Mandelbrot set explorer quite this fast, but I...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 11/28/2006
Wendybrot 1.0: A Mandelbrot set explorer written with XNA GSE
Ah, the Mandelbrot set. How does such a simple algorithm produce such intricate, beautiful pictures?...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 11/25/2006
Introducing my PIX / XNA / Game Programming / etc. blog...
Hey there. I've created this blog so I can post some (hopefully interesting) code and commentary...
Author: Michael Anderson Date: 11/25/2006