XNA
If you want to know the capabilities available in your graphics card you can use a tool in the DirectX SDK\Utilities\Bin\x86. This tool is called “DXCapsViewer.exe”. Here a screenshot with the capabilities of my NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT: You can download the latest DirectX SDK at the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/aa937788.aspx
Multisampling is an antialiasing technique directly supported by DirectX and obviously by XNA. The problem of aliasing occurs when you draw a line on a monitor with low resolution. In that cases you see a stair step when approximating a line by a matrix of pixels. Multisampling use neighbouring pixels (called samples) to calculate the final color of a pixel.
You can enable multisampling in XNA in this simple way:
graphics.PreferMultiSampling = true;
Then you should also specify two options.
The type is an enumerator (MultiSampleType) that represent the number of samples to use in multisampling. The quality is an...
I would like to inform you that an interesting stable project is available on codeplex. This is the Nuclex Framework.
This is the main page of the project:
http://nuclexframework.codeplex.com/
The more interesting features for me are the following:
3D Text Rendering
LZMA Content Compression (that's 7-Zip's compression)
Themeable Graphical User Interfaces
Game State Management
Debugging Overlays
Mathematics plays a fundamental role in video game development. I strongly recommend to study the basics of linear algebra to have a better control of what you create. However, in XNA there is a lot of support for analytical geometry. There are some complex algorithms already implemented so it’s extremely important to know what it is available.
You can manage positions, speeds and directions using the classes: Point, Vector2, Vector3 and Vector4.
Vector3 a = new Vector3(0, 0, 10);a.Normalize();float x = a.X;float y = a.Y;float z = a.Z;float length = a.Length();Vector3 b = Vector3.Right;Vector3 c = a + b;float distance =...
XNA is a fantastic technology and I want to learn it well.
If you don’t know nothing about 2D and 3D game development, I strongly recommend to buy the book “Learning XNA 3.0”. This is really easy to understand and it introduce to many concepts in a simple step by step approach. I read other three books about XNA but this is definitely the best as a starting point.
I would like to share with you my demo programs, without the purpose to be exhaustive but just to share interesting stuffs that I can find during my learning process.
It is quite...