Answer Questions

• Jay Longenderfer 3DS to X (or FBX) Model Conversion Software

  Does anyone know of a good freeware or (inexpensive) shareware conversion app that faithfully converts from 3DS to X format I'm not a modeler, nor can I afford a good modeling program with a plug-in, so a good free utility would rock. Thanks! Ethan Yes Collada, I had seen the great work Remi has been doing creating a XNA content processor for COLLADA documents and models. I knew about the first attempt Remi had at creatig a COLLADA importer but found all the problems Remi described when trying to use it. I've read the update now on the version 2 (Damn those COLLADA devs are quick!) and it seems a lot better so will try that, shame that it's still not yet able to do annimation yet either, this is a ...Show All

• Devi48354 Anyway to reset Game.GameTime?

  So when it's game over I want to reset my game to start a new one. Well my game has scripted events using Game.GameTime.TotalSeconds to trigger certian events. I need to reset that to 0. Anyway to do that since GameTime is readonly I guess I can just create my own variable to track time since last reset but was wondering if there was a better way. System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch is your friend. arogan wrote: I guess I can just create my own variable to track time since last reset but was wondering if there was a better way. i think you have to do that, like you said Game.GameTime is read-only. ...Show All

• sheldono Device Creation Problem

  Hi, I am a starter to the game development. I planned to create a small program(game) that just initializes a device as a startup. I decided to do it in c#. I have the VS2005 Express Edition to start development. I have also downloaded the DirectX SDK, oct 2006. But the express edition throws an error InvallidCallExcpetion Every time i create a device. This is how i create it. PresentParameters presentParams = new PresentParameters(); presentParams.Windowed = true; presentParams.SwapEffect = SwapEffect.Discard; device = new Device(0, Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D.DeviceType.Reference, this.Handle, CreateFlags.SoftwareVertexProcessing, presentParams); } I have a old graphics unit(sis 6326, 4 Mb) and a PII ...Show All

• Winks Shader data flow questions

  Two questions: 1. Is there any decent way to get a small chunk of data (4-8 bytes) from a vertex shader back to the CPU I would only do this in direct response to a mouse click, so it need not be fast, just possible. 2. The MSDN reference material here would suggest that a variable declared static could carry information from one shader invocation to the next, so that one could, for example, calculate a running min, max, or average of some property over all vertices. But in practice it seems that my static variable is zeroed afresh for every vertex. Below are the bones of my test case. The CPU program is providing each vertex with the "extra" variable, of which extra.x is a unique id for each vertex, sta ...Show All

• Rui Fiske Attempt to allocate VRAM before start of an application?

  Gateway is being dumb. Yes, it actually does relate to topic :P I have a Gateway MX6629 laptop that comes with an Intel GSM 915 on board video processing chip that is by design suppose to be able to dynamically allocate up to 128mb of video memory; however, after trying multiple OS with multiple drivers versions, it became evident that Gateway effed up the BIOS configurations and limited the chip to operate only up to 64mb of video memory. It took a lot of time for me to convince their support to escalate the issue to their higher ups -- a whole seven months for that matter -- and they gave me a stupid semi-canned response about how the dynamic video memory allocation technology works... as if I haven't read that before contacting them. An ...Show All

• drscape Creators' Club and xBox live

  This seems to be the most relevant forum for this question: I am producing my University project in XNA, but am unable to get my xBox 360 to connect through the internet via the University connection. While I can get to an internet connection which will allow me to connect to xBox Live, this would be inconvenient to do on a regular basis. Do I need to have my console connected to XBL at all times while I use XNA, or can I just connect once to verify my account and download the frameword, then continue working offline Thank you for your time. beemoh wrote: Do I need to have my console connected to XBL at all times while I use XNA, Yes. ...Show All

• Charley Lou Ray.Intersects()

  I am a bit confused concerning the return value for Ray.Intersect. The documentation (in summary) says: public Nullable<float> Intersects( BoundingBox box ) Return Value Class indicating the relationship between the Ray and BoundingBox . What does that mean I'm familiar with Nullable types, and assume it's null if they don't intersect, but what would the values mean Distance along the ray If it helps, my actual intent is to determine where on a bounding box a ray intersects in order to get the normal and calculate a reflection vector. If you have the ray direction "dir", the ray starting point "pos", and the distance along the ray "t", the ...Show All

• Pockey Best way to learn

  What is going to be the best way to learn XNA I have to say I am not used to "new" technologies. My experience comes from looking up tutorials and then following them and expanding off of them. However, with XNA this is brand new and I hope to be create the tools. Here in lies(sp ) problem I have no idea how to learn something without an abundance of tutorials. XNA has gotten me real excited and I can't wait to get my hands on it and maybe become one of the first people to really adobt and get into the XNA community. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Buddy Lindsey Since there won't be a lot of tutorials out there this soon -- the best way to learn will probabily be via the demos like Space Wars that are go ...Show All

• Yeshia Surfaces, Textures and Render Targets

  I am implementing an image processing framework in MDX and could use some assistance. I am unsure of the relationship between surfaces and textures, what I have so far is Load up image to be processed as render target texture Get surface of texture and set to current render target process texture set render target texture to source texture process texture read render target to system memory The problem is mainly with step 4. If I set the render target texture to be the source for the next pass, what am I rendering into Do I need to create a new texture and call SetRenderTarget on its surface How do I reuse surfaces and textures in this scenario Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Andrew. ...Show All

• Fradam Problem with audio buffer in DirectSound

  I'm having a tricky issue with DirectSound (DX 9, VC++ 2005) which seems to be a fairly commmon problem with a solution that I can't find. When I play a secondary buffer for a period of time then stop it, reset and then play again there is often some residual audio data in a buffer somewhere which gets played at the beginning of my new sample. I'm pretty sure the data is not in the secondary buffer given that I have tried memsetting it to 0 so I guess it may be on the sound card How can I flush this data out Am I missing something obvious Thanks in advance. J ...Show All

• GNLuver XNA Subscription != MSDN Subscription?

  I have a MSDN Liscense subscription w/full access to the MSDN Subscriber downloads, support, etc. Its expensive (as most here know). My question is, does this not include access to the 360 XNA studio creators club Do they really want another 99 bucks out of me after paying 2 grand I'd be real surprised if this was the case. I thought MSFT MSDN Subscription would break this barrier. Joe $99 is a heck of a lot cheaper than the price of the Xbox 360 Dev Kit that you would otherwise have to buy to do Xbox programming (even with your MSDN subscription). I dont think it will, the MSDN subscription is a developer centric license system giving you access to all of Microsofts development ...Show All

• Linda Cornerstone 2D fade transitions

  I'm attempting to do a 2d fade in/fade out effect on the screen, but I have no idea how to get that rolling. I've never played with .fx files or anything before. Could someone lend me some ideas Thanks! Jason You can produce simple but effective fades by drawing a sprite that covers the screen and modulating the alpha value of the sprite's Color. Use a simple 1 pixel white texture for the sprite and then adjust the Color value to have different colour fades. So to fade in from black, draw the sprite using a Color that changes over time from Vector4(0,0,0,1) to Vector4(0,0,0,0). Reverse the colours to fade out. Change the RGB values to use different colours. You could also use this to do cr ...Show All

• enric vives Access to Files on the 360's memory card / hard drive

  I'm currently working on a game intended for Live Arcade (hopefully) in C# and Managed DirectX. The game allows the user to select music from their music collection and bases the game behavior on the selected music file. I am intending to convert it to XNA at some point in the near future and was wondering if there is a way to load a user-selected file on the 360. I would imagine that at least the normal programming kits can do this, and was wondering if XNA will allow me to do something similar to wrapping DirectShow functions in Windows to get an uncompressed audio stream, but on the 360. -Aaron Based on the FAQ it appears that what I'm wondering about would fall under Media Player type functionality ( ...Show All

• kbradl1 Create Graphics device manual

  hello is it possible to create graphics device width out reffence to game in the top of the code example partial class SpacewarGame : ( Game) just like the old dayes width mdx 2.0 i wood like to control the graphics device my self so i can put all engine code in a dll file if some one have some code plaese post it michael There are some cases (especial multi monitor support) were it could be necessary to recreate the device. Can we get a sample of create the GraphicsDevice manually very similar to how you would in MDX i have solve some of the problems i'am faceing width what i cant figure out let me post a sample this sample goes into a dll public class Ev ...Show All

• beefeater Should shaders be getting disposed on device reset?

  Under MDX 1.1, once a vertex/pixel shader was compiled, the resulting compiled shader was good for the life of the application, and was still valid even after a device reset. However, under XNA, compiled shaders seem to go into an invalid state when the device is reset - attempting to set GraphicsDevice.VertexShader to a shader compiled before the device reset results in an AccessViolationException. Has the requirement on needing to compile shaders after a device reset changed between MDX 1.1 and XNA, or am I looking at a potential XNA bug That's interesting. If XNA is supposed to dispose ResourcePool.Default resources for us on device reset, then that definitely seems to be broken. If I remove my Dispos ...Show All