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March 2009 - Posts

Sibelius r0x0rz

Seattle weather can be pretty depressing this time of year. It rains, then it's cloudy, and then it rains some more. I can hardly even remember what warm sunlight feels like! But I discovered a workaround: listen to Sibelius symphonies with the volume

Automatic XNB serialization in XNA Game Studio 3.1

One of the new features in Game Studio 3.1 is automatic serialization for .xnb files. This is a feature I have wanted ever since we first designed the Content Pipeline, so it makes me very happy that we finally found time to implement it!   Short

Is floating point math deterministic?

I like my couch, and spend time sitting on it pretty much every evening. But I’m scared of what lies beneath it. An ungodly mix of food crumbs, cat hair, decaying skin cells... <shudder> I try not to think about it, and avoid looking under there!

MotoGP: replays

MotoGP had the ability to store and replay race events, and could save replays to disk. Players used this to view races after they finished, and in timetrial mode to race against a "ghost bike" that was playing back their previous best lap.

MotoGP: skidmarks

When a bike drove off the road, or braked so hard it lost traction, we wanted to leave a visible skidmark. We could reuse existing collision data for this, as the physics engine had already computed the contact point between the wheel and ground. We created

MotoGP: custom paint jobs

MotoGP included a feature that let players customize their bikes, choosing their own color scheme and adding up to eight vector layers (rectangles, circles, or text) to build up a custom logo. Here is the editor in action: Our design had the following
 
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