Answer Questions

• maverick_majnoo How to grant time?

  Sleep(); Wait(); Slerp() -- lol How to grant time to what A bit more detail about what you're trying to achieve would be useful here. r2d2-proton wrote: Incidentally, when returning from a game the Run loop will redisplay the splash screen again – unless of course an Exit is requested. Well, yeah, you would expect a loop to do that wouldn't you r2d2-proton wrote: So yes, I would say that the Game class needs a rework. Or your code does. There's nothing wrong with the Game class. It sounds like you need a better gamestate manager . Never mind. . .rebooted. I was missing a lot of XInput's (on a windows machine). But it would be nice to know how to put a threa ...Show All

• daniele bonini Getting typed text into xna aka getting WM_CHAR in xna?

  if i'm trying to get typed text into xna, what is the best way to do that I thought maybe i could start with a Windows Form and override WndProc() to capture WM_CHAR, but how do i properly do that... is there a #define that represents if i'm building for 360 or windows can i create a form then associate my game object with it somehow if i'm building for windows but does xbox 360 use windows messaging to do character input or does it map keys to actions (clunky!) The XBOX 360 supports standard USB keyboards. Jim Perry wrote: What do you mean by "get typed text into xna" Do you want the text rendered as it's typed Check the various font rendering projects, such ...Show All

• ADub Rendering hundreds of models

  How do games like Medieval: Total War 2 render hundreds of skinned models running different animations on the screen and still run at a good frame rate Is it possible that the models are not skinned I can't get more than 100 skinned models (matrix palette size = 50, verts = 5000) to run without getting a noticeable frame rate hit. This has to do with the fact that I am using shader instancing and doing 100 draw methods. I confirmed this by taking out all the animation and update code and only calling draw 100 times every frame. It's possible that my shader is inefficient (the DirectX examples split the shaders up based on influences per vertex), but I don't think it would be that huge of a difference. My skinning function is very similar ...Show All

• Leo Kent DrawableGameComponents as primary graphical output.

  Would it be a valid programming approach in XNA to have the main game's Draw function not draw anything, but use DrawableGameComponent classes to perform all of the video processing This would seem to make sense, because you have various screen types in a game, which could all be DrawableGameComponents, such as the startup screen, FMV screens, gameplay screens, etc. Also, would you use DrawableGameComponent for something like a character in the game, since it is 'drawn' to the screen Or would you make it a simple class, or maybe a regular GameComponent, and have the appropriate screen DrawableGameComponent class perform the drawing for it I did what you describe first in my game, and the only added ...Show All

• Ashish Derhgawen XNA Game Studio Express/Framework is ready!

  Get it here: http://msdn.com/xna/gse XNA Dev Center (going live soon) will have the readme file along with an updated FAQ. Enjoy! Thanks, I'll try it out and see if I can code myself a blue screen! Should be pretty easy as the Windows Game Starter Kit shows one. (not a BSOD, just a window colored light blue, at least on my laptop) It's like christmas in August! *dances* Huzzah! 12:26 EST, Sherbrooke. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! ^^ And it's now unavailable. Oh how i smell pwnt-ness floating ^^ ...Show All

• No-spam Sam Direct3D for my GUI

  Hello... I'm writing an app in native C++/win32. It has a complex GUI that I have created with bitmaps. Since it has to be very fast I'm thinking about making it using direct3d (or Directdraw). I don't want to use controls, just a window where I paint in it's client area. Do you think I can have performance increasing over GDI If so is it better to use direct3d or directdraw Thanks! Digital, First off, DirectDraw is still in the API but it has been deprecated for sometime now, so it would be recommended if building something new to not use this. Direct3D could provide better options for you as opposed to using GDI. GDI will do all the work on the CPU and with Direct3D you could take advantage of a GPU if available. If you are ...Show All

• Barry Kwok No Design Veiw

  Hello I am writing a game or atleast am attemptting to write a game. I started off by looking at a tutorial on another site about how to create a pong game in XNA. It tell me to go into the designer veiw of Game1.cs{design} and use the graphic the only problem with this is that I have no Game1.cs[design] veiw I have tried several differnt times to start over and get it to come up and it will not can anyone please help me out everything else cames up with a design veiw. So I would really like to know what I am doing wrong. Thank you That tutorial for written for beta 1. Beta 2 no longer has a design view for game components. I would contact whoever wrote the tutorial and ask him to update it. ...Show All

• lcj Stop Sound

  I'm using this simple code to play a sound: http://xbox360homebrew.com/blogs/audio/archive/2006/09/01/119.aspx I know the asnwer to this must be very simple, but how do I stop a sound I'm guessing I got to use something like : Sound.Stop(xxx); but I do not know what is it that I am supposed to provide. Thanks in advance. I can't call the play/stop function without using "Sound" before it, and I already set a reference to the class, the Audio DLL, etc. Im just going to forget about this 'tutorial' Thanks for your reponses. Right, the answer I just gave you was for calling those methods from another class. When you call the Play method from the other class you are currently calling it lik ...Show All

• veryxRV XNA/Xbox 360 memory management heads-up...

  I was just browsing through some docs on the 360's heap manager, and it turns out it is a compacting mark and sweep collector rather than the generational model used on the desktop... So... what's the deal regarding: Large block allocation (will it have a large object heap like the desktop version ) GC pauses times (do all threads halt during GC) Rico Mariani recommends a heap size equivalent to the Gen 0 size on the desktop, i.e. ~cache size. That seems way too small unless we are dumping lots of game data into unmanaged memory! Andy. Rico Mariani's last blog entry . We actually do allow C# unsafe code blocks on Xbox, including arbitrary pointer arithmetic. You just don't have any way to P/Invo ...Show All

• tgbt What file types (for models) can you import into XNA?

  Can i use 3ds max 8/9 to create models for XNA And will i be able to use their properties (textures, shaders and bone structure etc.) See here . ...Show All

• danleis The woes of boxed objects (and foreach)

  Here's another post by someone who has learned everything through mistakes, not learning it right in the first place . :) I've been working on some nasty GC issues on Xbox360 for some time now, and through RPM and CLR Profiler I've started to make some sense of things, so I thought I'd let everyone in on my experience so that the next guy (or gal) with these issues can have some info. So here's the story: Remote Performance Monitor showed 240 boxed value types per delta. Having no idea how I was creating boxed objects (or what they are), I ran the CLR profiler--as it would happen, I had 4 foreach calls per frame--for a postprocessing effect. According to CLR Profiler, the foreach calls were creating System.Collections.Generic.List<T> ...Show All

• DanielMena Crazy Hiccups

  Any general guidelines for looking into and dealing with crazy hiccups on X360 Every minute or so there'll be a good 0.5 - 1.0 second lockup followed by business as normal. Garbage collection runs a lot faster than that, like several times per second, right Thanks. Thanks! Now, I'm trying to run the remote performance monitor, but here's the problem evidently (from the log): XNARPM.exe Error: 0 : RemoteDeviceManager.LoadPluginAssembly Exception: Could not load file or assembly 'RemoteToolsFramework.LocalPackage' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. XNARPM.exe Error: 0 : RemoteDeviceManager.LoadPluginAssembly Exception: Could not load file or assembly 'RemoteToolsFramework.RAPIPackage' or one of it ...Show All

• carlop Migration from Express to Pro.

  First, I think this is a good approach by MS to get more games out there. I have a couple of questions though. Maybe someone from Microsoft will be able to answer these. 1. What will the upgrade path be from the Express version to the Pro version As the Pro edition comes much later, it's likely many independent development companies will start with the express version to get something going, then migrate up to the Pro when that is released. 2. There are people like me that are in the middle of the pack. I create commercial games for the PC and wish to get into the console market. This solution sounds like the answer. I'm not a hobbyist. I put food on the table selling my PC based games. Yet I'm not Electronic Arts either with ...Show All

• susantez Adjusting the Gamma Ramp

  Hi, I'm currently wondering how to set the gamma ramps with XNA. This is a function I wrote to do it: Protected Sub SetGamma( ByVal red As Single , ByVal green As Single , ByVal blue As Single ) ' Get graphics device. Dim graphicsDevice As GraphicsDevice = graphics.GraphicsDevice ' Get gamma ramp from device. Dim gammaRamp As GammaRamp = graphicsDevice.GetGammaRamp(0) ' Adjust values of RPG components. Dim redValues As Short () = gammaRamp.GetRed() Dim greenValues As Short () = gammaRamp.GetGreen() Dim blueValues As Short () = gammaRamp.GetBlue() For index As Integer = Byte .MinValue To Byte .MaxValue redValues(index) *= red greenValues(index) ...Show All

• Ayooya The Unofficial "Hooray I'm Done With my DBP Game" Thread

  When you get done with you game and sumbit it, crow about it here. A little over 24 hours left until the deadline and I'm so amazed I'm done, so much better than college Thanks to ZMan for his help, good luck all. I'll post the source code for my submission once the deadline hits. Bill Dan Lingman wrote: The quote about adding people to a late project will make it later is very true. I'd started with a team size of three - Me, my wife, and my 3.5 year old playtester, Katrina. Feb 27th we added a new team member - Naomi. Yeah I had a team very similar to that, my 8 year old daughter was my main playtester and my wife was the "novice gamer" to make sure it wasn't ridiculously hard. By new team ...Show All