Answer Questions

• Whoisit Framerate jumps once per second

  I recently noticed a strange behaviour of my application: about once a second I got a jump of my framerate. I investigated the problem and ended up with an empty WindowsGame application. I used the PIX Tool to look at the framerates and durations of every frame. And no matter what I tried the behaviour was always clearly noticeable. About once a second the framerate first dropped for one frame and was significantly higher (above average) in the next frame, like it made up for the lost time in the first frame. The problem is less noticable in full screen and when MultiSampling is set to false. It is also less noticable if the RefreshRate is set to 60 Hz. But it is always there. Is there an explanation for this behaviour I noticed it in one ...Show All

• Shughes Catching Auto-CD launch window message in a game

  Hi, Does anyone know of a way to catch if a CD-Auto Launch is kicked off and not allow that window to become the foreground window. In my game I would like to keep my Windows app as the foreground window. I'm only looking to do this in the case of a CD-Auto Launch happening. Thanks in advance. Hrm… That just doesn't seem right to me. Obviously there is a way to do it, as many installers prompt you for the next disc in a series, then keep on chuggin’ after you insert it. (As opposed to letting the auto-play feature pop up and ask you what you want to do about the disc...) Granted that most games now install the whole of themselves onto the users hard drive, but lets say theoretically th ...Show All

• BRCEWANE Model Bones

  I have a .X file of a mesh with the following bone structure: Frame joint1 { FrameTransformMatrix { 1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,1.000000;; } Frame joint2 { FrameTransformMatrix { 1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,1.000000;; } Frame joint3 { FrameTransformMatrix { 1.000000,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,1.000000,0.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,1.000000,0.000000, 0.000000,0.000000,8.00000,1.000000;; ...Show All

• Kfir Dadosh Audio Analysis

  Hi, Is there an easy way to gain access to final sound buffers using the XNA framework What I'm aiming to achieve is an oscilloscope style wave display of the currently played audio. Is this at all possible Cheers, 71M Bugger!!! I guess I could decode the music myself and sniff around in the decoded data for what I'm after. Cheers, 71M I was wondering the same thing...will we be able to access the buffers in future renditions of XNA I'm just wondering if it's on the radar...that way if it isn't I can take some time investigating other ways (ie. analyzing the file before hand). You can read streams...and try to analyze that. But, believe me ...Show All

• bitpaq.com Making XNA/Managed code secure

  What is being done to make managed code more secure for commercial applications. I can't see how any companies would be willing to switch to managed code for prime time games as long as MSIL can be easily reverse engineered. I love XNA and Managed code and pray that eventually commercial industry will as well (so I can put my C# skills towards gaming instead of business apps). Our company is already hesitant to make WinForm applications due to the ease in which these applications can be decompiled and reversed. This is an interesting question. Does the obfuscator linked above work with XNA Anybody tried it I know that the "Community Edition" comes with Visual Studio. But I'm not sure if in comes with the Express Editions. ...Show All

• J A Y Polygon Tessellation

  Hi, I would like to perform tessellation on a 2D closed polygon. In fact just like you can with OpenGL using its GLU Tessellation Functions. Now I am using managed DirectX 9.0, and for the life of me can not find an equivalent in DirectX.   Am I searching in vein guys, any comments appreciated     Julian Tessellation are for Meshes in DX DX is very mush Mesh oriented, so you need to create a mesh from your vertex When you have your mesh you can use the D3DXMeshTessellate functions Hi, I had looked at Meshes, but I assumed meshes are made from triangles in the first place. This is not what I have, my polygon is ma ...Show All

• RonDiamond PIX, DX10 and Render to Texture

  Does PIX support DX10 properly i need to link dx9 libs to get pix support which makes me think its not. Secondly, pix does give me some information when i do a capture, how ever now that i've implemented some more render to texture goodness, pix doesnt capture a whole frame, it only captures till i unbind the first render texture, anything i can do do some how get it to capture a whole frame > when i do a single frame capture, it only record up un till the first render to texture has been unbound. So, you're saying it records up until you call SOSetTargets to unbind the texture you rendered to At that point does it crash, or is that just the last call that makes it into the PIXRun file Have yo ...Show All

• bkohler DXGI_FORMAT_R11G11B10_FLOAT format

  Hi, the DXGI_FORMAT_R11G11B10_FLOAT render target format seems to be a clear winner when it comes to HDR rendering. The question I could not find an answer in the documentation for is: is it guaranteed to support alpha blending, multi-sampling and filtering Thanks in advance, - Wolf Yes, it's guarantied to support rendering to and texturing from (with filterting). Multisampling can be supported or not (AFAIK G80 does support multisampling on it). But I will argue that it's a great format for rendertarget - I can bet it wil have too small recision in most cases. Nevertheless it could be a good format for storing specialy preprocessed HDR textures. I can confi ...Show All

• RichardCasey Multi threading in a game (using XNA)

  Hello. I am able to create thread and make them exchange information through common objects they know (server / each other reference) Now I would like 2 threads to update a server. Each of those threads takes for inputs a keyboard for one, a mouse for the other one. However, it seems that the thread that listens on the keyboard do not detect events from it. Seems like it is the parent thread that is able to listen to a keyboard event and only that parent thread. How would you do so that a children thread is master over a device even if it does not have the focus Regards, Chryso You seem to be going about this wrong, instead of writing specific input code for all different types of inputs I would first c ...Show All

• DWitty setting IsMouseVisible to true improves performance

  Does anyone else notice that setting the IsMouseVisible to true improves performance Whenever i move my mouse and IsMouseVisible is set to false, my framerate decreases significantly Any thoughts Please file this on connect if you haven't already: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=682921&SiteID=1 done. I've not tried changing that property, but I've had similar issues with the mouse. When running in windowed mode, if the mouse is over the window things run normally, but when moving the mouse outside the window CPU is pegged and frame rate drops significantly. thats exactly what i'm running into, setting ...Show All

• Phillip S. Rants on XNA 1.0

  This is my first reaction when I installed and tried the 1.0 of XNA. To summarize my feeling: it's still 95% for XBox and no nearer to replace the old MDX 1.0. So I decided not to migrate from MDX to XNA though I want to do that very much. I feel like MDX 2 more; amen to MDX 2. The hardest issue for me is the content pipeline, which is very necessary, but the workflow is fixed and it assumes the contents are only built before the program runs. The helper functions wrapping D3DX can only be used with types in the content pipeline. I have to utilize the full content pipeline just for generating something dynamically, of course with significant performance cost. Or I have to write those D3DX utilities my self. Currently I don't have a good id ...Show All

• Krutika Can we play the games? What is the point?

  I am sorry if this is listed somewhere, but I saw that you cannot play the Spacewar game, except on the Xbox 360. I know I can: "If you don't have a 360 game pad then you can't get past the main screen. But we can change all of that. Open the “GamePadHelper.cs” file. It can be found under the “common” files in the solution explorer. The top line looks like this. //#define USE_KEYBOARD Uncomment that line to look like this. #define USE_KEYBOARD" http://www.xnaspot.com/Tutorial_GettingStarted.aspx But what I don't get is if I can't play the game but on the 360, and I can't publish the game (which I think just means burn it to a CD or DVD) to get it to the XBox 360, then I'm not understanding the point. Do I just ...Show All

• Shady Brady Overlay invalid pixel format exception

  Hello, I'm currently using Direct 9.0c. The "overlay sample" (http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp topic_id=359319) works very fine on a PC with ATI Radeon X300. But the same code is unable to work on Intel 82852/82855 : I get the "DDERR_INVALIDPIXELFORMAT" exception with the message "pixel format was invalid as specified" and crashes the application. What shall I do I don't know anything about Intel graphics cards, but it's a safe bet that the card doesn't support the format you're attempting to use. Fastest way to verify that is to switch to using the reference rasterizer from the SDK and see if it runs on the machine that has the Intel card. If so, it's ...Show All

• windoze Export facial animations from MAX 8 using Morpher modifier

  Hi, We use 3D Studio MAX 8 to animate some faces based on motion capture data and the Morpher Modifier of MAX. How can we export these facial animations and render them in DirectX -We don't want to change/morph the faces in realtime, we just want to play back the mocap-based facial animations at given timestamps. (We have managed it properly for body animations based on motion capture, but then we have bones and use the Skin modifier, which is easier) Thanks! For anyone interested, seems like this is a possible solution: Write a MAXScript that exports to file the percentage usage of all morph targets/expressions at each keyframe Export all morph targets Load morph ta ...Show All

• SillaS Calling Present() with sync interval of 1 in windowed mode

  Hi all, I'm currently working on porting an existing engine to D3D10 (using Vista RC1 build 5600, DX9 SDK Aug 2006) on RefRast. With a windowed device I get the following debug output when calling Present(1, 0) on my swap chain. First-chance exception at 0x7676dde0 in ArtPreviewerDebug.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: _com_error @ 0x0012f458. If I call Present(0,0), i.e. with no wait for sync interval I don't get the error. Is this simply a change for D3D10 that you can't wait for the vertical sync in windowed mode any more or is there some other issue I'm missing I get the same results if I modify one of the D3D10 samples to call Present(1,0). However, when I try to switch one of the D3D10 samples to fullscreen to see if I can confirm my th ...Show All