Answer Questions

• Gurpreet Singh Gill Creating depth textures and getting back buffer in beta 2?

  Alright, so the API for this is totally different for beta 2. That's fine. But I can't see how you create depth textures now. I'm using them to render shadows. Also, how do you get and restore the back buffer now Do you do something like: RenderTarget2D backBuffer = (RenderTarget2D)device.GetRenderTarget(0); ... device.SetRenderTarget(0, backBuffer); You can't read back depth buffer data into textures any more. We took out that ability because it doesn't work consistently on all cards: some graphics vendors have hacked the ability into their drivers, but this isn't an official part of the DX spec and people who use it tend to get in trouble when they try to run their program on a wider range of graphics cards and realise this doesn' ...Show All

• priyanka.dash Copying from one Texture Surface to another

  I'm trying to copy a small rectangle from one texture to another, but D3D is complaining. Apparently I can't use Device.UpdateSurface because these surfaces are both created in Pool.Managed, and not the annoying requirement of having one in Pool.Default and one in Pool.SystemMemory. So I'm trying to lock the surfaces to copy the bits manually. I can lock the surface I want to read from ok, but I can't lock the surface I want to write to. Here is the code I am trying: // create a new surface to copy the pixels from the srcRect to mTexture = new Texture (mDevice, sourceRect.Width, sourceRect.Height, 1 , Usage .None, Format .A8R8G8B8, Pool .Managed); int [,] gwrite = ( int [,])mTexture.GetSurfaceLevel( 0 ).Lock ...Show All

• learningdba Thanks XNA Team

  Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work. As a life long gamer, I have always wanted to play around with game development. Looking at the source code for games like Quake or Quake 2 really intimidated the hell out of me. Thanks for making something simple and well thought out to wet my theeth on. And there's my download of the Multiplayer Dark Messiah Beta... just sitting there and being neglected... my favorite type of game... been waiting for years for something like Dark Messiah's coolness... and I probably won't touch it till it releases this fall now. See above post about why. :P Thanks XNA Team and thanks Microsoft. I'm in love. I'm in love. I'm in love. I'm in love. I'm in l ...Show All

• moveit problem with adding camera input

  I have to use camera input and to do this i am using a third party .net utility (from theimagingsource) when i put it on its own winform and i try to compile ActiveX control 'e0110be7-ebf0-4612-b2f8-817194557141' cannot be instantiated because the current thread is not in a single-threaded apartment. am i doing something wrong forgetting something I have no problem getting cam input this way in the DX samples Off the top of my head, try adding: [ STAThread ] before your Main. i managed to get the same error from DX9c empty project any suggestions anyone I am kind of lost Best regards Bill Thanks Jim thats was the th ...Show All

• Omerrr Physical Memory Question

  Also (I asked another questio about framerate earlier) what is the norm for the amount of physical memory a 2D usaully takes. Mine, according to the Ctrl-Alt-Delete performance counter, takes up about 220 MegaBytes of physical memory. I don't really think that most games take that much. So my question is, What is the normal amount of physical memory for a game to take It DOESN'T MATTER. The physical memory shown in the process manager is mostly a big, fat lie, for various technical reasons having to do with how virtual memory is allocated and managed in Windows. If your game runs fine on the target machine, then it's using the right amount of memory. It's that simple! We once developed a tool that kicked all pages out for a given pr ...Show All

• MShetty New 2D Xmas Themed Game

  I have written my first ever XNA game, it is a Christmas themed 2D game. It is called Elves Revenge, and screenshots and gameplay demo are available at http://www.errolian.com Full details of the game and the downloads (game, plus source code) are at http://www.errolian.com/2006/11/22/3d-buzz-xmas-game-coding-contest-elves-revenge/ Thanks for the clarification Glenn, I appreciate it. I am new to the forums and just want to make sure I understand the protocols and expectations. Thanks again for the reply. Don Hi Glenn - Quick question. Can you elaborate a little more what is wrong with the post I am not trying to be smart or anything I really don't know. I gathered ...Show All

• Jordan2k4 Website to download components

  In Mitch Walker's blog, he says he expects to see cool components from the community. Will Microsoft have a website to host these components Kind of like how highend3d lets people share all the scripts and plugins people make for cg packages. people are working on it already We are working hard to get a community site built that will scale for the future growth of XNA-based games, both in content and community support. Such a site isn't easy to "throw together". Think of something like Sourceforge, Wikipedia, and Gamedev.net all rolled together. It's a scary task...and it's my job (so stop making me answer these forum questions so that I can get back to work on this! ) The VS code s ...Show All

• wade_ Buttons not waiting for release

  I'm making a Tetris clone in XNA GSE and I'm having trouble with the controls. I've created the pieces and got them to animate using the Animation tutorial in the docs, but when I hook the animation to button pushes, they spin wildly until the button is released. What I want them to do is turn once when the button is pushed and wait until the button is released and pushed again to turn again. I know I'm missing something but I can't think what it is. Here's my UpdateGamePad() method which is called from Game.Update(): private void UpdateGamePad() { gamePad = GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One); if (gamePad.Buttons.A == ButtonState.Pressed) { CurrentFrame++; if (CurrentFrame > 3) CurrentFrame -= 4; ...Show All

• satya31237 Dream-Build-Play contest question

  In case you haven't heard yet here's the link. www.dreambuildplay.com/index.html I was just wondering if anyone knew exactly when it begins and if you need to have a 360 to be able to enter the contest. It sounds like an interesting thing, I'll probably enter my Banshee game... By the way, I don't know if anyone noticed, but the dashes and dots towards the bottom are Morse code for "your world, your game" Cool. I didn't even think of that. No one outside of MS, and even then probably very few outside of whoever's running it, know exactly when as well as what the rules are. Keeping hitting the site every day, as I'm doing, and you'll find out soon en ...Show All

• ProblemQueen Text (font) on 3D Mesh

  Hello out there... Anyone have an idea how to render text on a 3d mesh like the simple cube So i know that the simple (2d) fonts uses Texture2D but i don't get that on a mesh ... thx... markus You have a couple of choices. 1. Instead of using the SpriteBatch class you can create your own 3d quads for the letters and place them over the cube. 2. Render your letters using spritebatch to a texture and then apply that texture to your cube. If you want to just write whatever on the cube you have to create a bitmap and save it and then reload it as a texture. And on that bitmap place all the letters in the correct place before saving and loading it as a texture. That will only work if you know the text in ad ...Show All

• prthealien Undefined errorcode from D3DXGetImageInfoFromFile

  At the moment i'm programming a 2d graphical engine with directX9, but when i try to run the function D3DXGetImageInfoFromFile((LPCWSTR) filename, &imginfo); it gives back an undefined error code, i'm using the directx october 2005 sdk with the latest version of the directx runtimes. Full engine GraphEngine.h: #pragma once class GraphEngine; #include <D3d9.h> #include <Windows.h> #include "GraphResource.h" class GraphEngine { public : IDirect3D9 *D3D; IDirect3DDevice9 *D3DDevice; IDirect3DSurface9 *D3DScreen; GraphEngine(HWND hWnd); ~GraphEngine( void ); void drawImage(GraphResource *img, int X, int Y); void RefreshScreen(); }; GraphEngine.cpp: ...Show All

• AxeldraX Problem with initial Run.

  Oh great wise XNA gurus... I need your professional help with a problem I am having with the initial run/debug of my starter game. I'm follow the instructions in the "Create your first game tutorial" and went ahead and added my first sprite. When I build solution and run the .exe it brings up an error and I go ahead and debug the problem. This is what it shows: "An unhandled exception of type 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Components.NoSuitableGraphicsDeviceException' occurred in Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.dllAdditional information: Could not find a Direct3D device compatible with the current device preferences." I tried reinstalling DirectX, rebooting still nothing. Am I doing something wrong Or did I skip a step in the compilation or install ...Show All

• alwayslearning Upcoming Starter Kits

  From yesterday's webcast (where was everyone ), it was mentioned that a puzzle starter kit would be included in the RTM version and that the XNA Racer starter kit would come with the Creator's Club membership. I didn't get a chance to confirm this. Is this the case Also, are there any plans for other starter kits down the road that's great news ... Frank Savage seemed pretty sure that it wouldn't work in that c9 video. I get a pretty good signal so I think I'll give it a go. I have been meaning on running some wire over to my entertainment center anyways just to get that extra bandwidth on XBL :-P I'll probably do that sometime next year. Edit: sorry for hijacking your thread Jim ... bring on the starter kits!! :-P Jim Pe ...Show All

• Amanda Jamin UV Coordinates of a mouse click

  Is there any way to find out the UV coordinates of a ray's intersection with a model (i.e., to read the position of a mouse click on the "screen" of a model of a TV in a scene ) Hopefully a method to do all of this for you will be included in the next release of the XNA Framework, since you could do it very easily in Managed DirectX (MDX) 2.0 using the Mesh.Intersect method, considering that XNA is supposed to replace MDX and make things easier. :) Mesh processing is moved into the content pipeline in XNA. The Model class does not actually give you access to the mesh data at all, in the default implementation, so there could not be a Model.IntersectRay() function. G ...Show All

• da Vinci XBox 360 Style Guide?

  I was wondering if there was some sort of XBox 360 UI style guide available somewhere. At the very minimum, I was looking for information about what colors to use when creating textures to represent the gamepad buttons. I wanted to put things like, "Press (A) to Continue", or "(B) Back" in my UI screens and, short of loading up a screenshot of some game in an image editor and figuring out the various colors to use in the gradient by hand, I would like the colors to be correct. Thanks, That will definitely work for now, thanks for the link. However, it would be nice to have an official source for the information ... that way an artist could use the proper colors to create UI that fits the styleguide, but also fit ...Show All