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January 2007 - Posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2007 3:01 PM

Debugging XNA graphics problems

XNA Game Studio Express has good support for debugging C# code, but is not so helpful when it comes to diagnosing problems with your graphics rendering calls. Fortunately, the native DirectX SDK includes some tools that can be invaluable when your gorgeous
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 1 Comments
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 3:50 PM

Using XNA with WinForms

I often see people trying to use the XNA Game class in unusual places, for instance to host an XNA game inside a WinForms application. That is usually a bad idea. The Game class is designed to be simple, automatically setting everything up ready for you
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 1:33 PM

Building XNA content without using C# Express

Way back in November I blogged about how to use MSBuild to run your own content build, bypassing the C# Express user interface. I only recently noticed the XCB project on Codeplex , which does exactly that and provides a nice looking user interface for
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 2 Comments
Monday, January 15, 2007 3:27 PM

Dean Johnson on 3D rotations

Another XNA team member arrives in the land of blogs! Dean Johnson starts off by talking about the math involved in rotating 3D objects . Good introduction to dot products, cross products, and orientation matrices.
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 0 Comments
Monday, January 08, 2007 6:18 PM

Capturing screenshots from Xbox XNA games

Taking screenshots of Windows games is easy thanks to that handy little PrintScreen key, but Xbox has no built in screenshot functionality so we have to roll our own as part of our game code. XNA doesn't have any way of transferring files back from Xbox
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 5 Comments
Wednesday, January 03, 2007 11:26 AM

Point sprites on Xbox

Those of you who have tried to render point sprites on Xbox will have noticed they don't work quite the same as on Windows. We are working on updating the XNA documentation to cover the various Xbox HLSL extensions, but in the meantime, here's what you
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 7 Comments
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 7:15 PM

In which I find myself on the silver screen

Channel9 has a rather long video from the XNA Game Studio Express launch event last month. Not only do you get to meet the famous George Clingerman, but in the middle there is some footage of yours truly demonstrating a splitscreen shooter game I wrote
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 3 Comments
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 6:24 PM

SpriteBatch and custom blend modes

I said I would write some more about using custom renderstates with SpriteBatch, and being a man of my word, here it comes... The SpriteBlendMode enum has built in support for a couple of the most common blending modes. AlphaBlend is good for most translucent
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 2 Comments
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 2:52 PM

Inline those vector constructors

Reading Chris To's article about Xbox CLR performance (see my previous post) reminded me of a subtle optimization for constructing new vector instances. Given some code like: DoCoolStuffWithVector( new Vector3(23, 42, -1)); You can rewrite this to avoid
Posted by ShawnHargreaves | 4 Comments
 
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