Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a 3D game engine using XNA and wanted to implement some model measuring functionality. I noticed that my measurements weren’t coming out quite right so with the help of the App Hub’s shape renderer sample I was able to visualise the bounding sphere for the model and [...]
While working on a new game engine using XNA I decided to run Visual Studios profiling tools against a basic demo game to measure CPU usage. The results showed that the update process used approximately 65% of the CPU time while the render process used roughly 25%. This ratio was not what I had expected [...]
I spent a bit of time this evening on the phone talking to a friend about life, the universe and work. We got around to talking a bit about accessing a database from within an XNA application so I thought I would make a quick sample and post it on here.
This is just a quick article to share this interesting article by Jonny Hughes about the difference in performance between using a byte array and a Color array to generate data for a new Texture2D object in XNA. The results surprised me a bit; I didn’t expect the use of the Color object to use [...]
This was a project that was not mostly pointless and impractical but is as bizarre as this article’s title makes it sound. One day about two years ago I was bored, very bored. I was at a total loss for small projects to work on in the evenings after work. Somehow I came up with [...]
This past week I have spent a little bit of time playing with the Kinect SDK and trying to get to grips with how it all works. My biggest interest is to use the Kinect SDK along with Microsoft’s XNA Framework for games development so I made a sample project using these technologies. I’ve posted [...]
In this article I’m sharing a couple of quick extension methods I made for working with the Kinect SDK Beta. I was experimenting with using the Kinect sensor in an XNA project and found myself wanting to do two things; convert the output from the RGB stream to a Texture2D and to get the position [...]
I like to experiment a lot with XNA to try and find ways of doing things which I haven’t tried before. Recently I have been doing some reading around the .NET Reactive Extensions and thought that it might be pretty useful to use something like that in an XNA game. I played around with it [...]
For my final year project at university I’ve been doing a bit of work with Windows Phone 7 and naturally that has involved working with gestures a bit. I think the gesture support in XNA 4 is great but I found myself writing the same code over and over again to handle them. So I [...]
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of XNA work which involves loading XML files via the content pipeline and I frequently found myself wanting to do more with the IntermediateSerializer than the basics. I did a bit of a search and came up with the following blog article by Shawn Hargreaves that has helped me [...]