Answer Questions

• venp XNA Download

  How big will the file be I'm rumming on Dial-up and don't want ot be waiting for hours trying to download it. The beta is 93MB, including 1 starter kit. This does not include Visual C# Express. Pretty much everything takes hours on dial-up, so be prepared. If it's under 50MB I'll be surprised, but I'm thinking more like 100MB or more. I don't think I will get any work done on Wednesday. Oh, Crap... I HATE DIALUP! But it's the only thing I can afford. :( You may not want to download it on dialup. The Visual Studio Express packages downloads are anywhere between 37-70 MB to download (And from what I've been reading, Visual C# is required along with ...Show All

• pwhitaker Pointer misunderstanding?

  Sorry if this seems very basic... I have done all coding up to now in C, so playing with this GSE is quite a bit different than the embedded programming I do at work... I'm trying to manipulate a cube. Nothing special, I just want to update the x and y coordinates based on mouse movement. I have a VertexPositionColor[] nonIndexedCube set up so my cube is just chillin for now. Why can't I manipulate the members of that pointer with either of the following ways foreach (VertexPositionColor vpc in nonIndexedCube) vpc.Position.X += 1; // loop shortened... -- or -- for (int i = 0; i < 36; i++) nonIndexedCube .Position.X += 1; // loop shortened The errors are the same for both ways: Cannot modify the return value because it is not a v ...Show All

• Balwant Patel Multiple RenderTargets with a Final PostProcess

  Hey, I am playing around with a SceneManager component I am working on and have been wondering how to do something. Right now I have a class called a RenderGroup which can render a collection of items to a RenderTarget and then Post Process the RT with an Effect. I want to take it one step further and have multiple RenderGroups(RenderTargets) and post process all of them one more final time. How is this possible Can I grab the BackBuffer before rendering completes and run an effect on it or something Do I put another RenderTarget in index 1 (instead of 0) or something Speaking of which, what is the multiple indices for when setting RenderTargets jsedlak wrote: Speaking of which, what is the multiple indices for ...Show All

• Zakamon Self-Shadowing Shader?

  A while back I was looking for some HLSL tutorials and came across a rather good self-shading, two-pass shader. At the time, I wasn't interested in shadows, so I didn't take much note of it. Now I can't seem to find the tutorial. All I remember is it had a render of a dark red chair with shadows on itself from a single light source. Can anyone help me find it The DirectX SDK comes with shadow rendering examples along with basic descriptions of how they work: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx FamilyId=09F7578C-24AA-4E0A-BF91-5FEC24C8C7BF&displaylang=en Also, ATI's RenderMonkey tool comes with more advanced shadow examples, such as shadows with soft edges, but they are not explained ...Show All

• WinFormsUser13232 PC deployment in a single download. (Minus framework download)

  I have not seen this posted since the 1.0 release. I really want to be able to get games into peoples hands with the least number of steps.. Downloading the framework is one more step I do not wish the less technically inclined to have to deal with. Has there been any more information released on the future prospects of being (PC SIDE) able to have a deployable game that does not require the download of external libraries ( The XNA framework ) Thank you and sorry if I missed a post on this. Jon Watte wrote: Easiest is to use the re-distributable installers for .NET 2.0 and XNA and DirectX, and put those installers into your game installer. Then chain out to those installers, in "/silent" mod ...Show All

• Acanthus Rest method (make the computer chill)

  I'm trying to put together a method that makes the computer rest or delay itself from going too fast or from looping through the game again. Here's the code I put together, but it doesn't seem to be working. void Rest( int milliseconds) { for ( int i = 0; i < milliseconds; ) i += ElapsedRealTime.Milliseconds; } Has anyone put together something similar that works Its probably better to handle that by just checking the time in the Update method. If you add pauses yourself you will affect the framerate of the game plus if there is any other animation you want to do you wont be able to. Look in the spacewar code for how I did the number counting at the ends of the rounds. ...Show All

• Kline Chen China Runtime footprint on 360

  How much RAM is left to play with on the 360 once the launcher and runtime has loaded One way you could find out for yourself: public static void MeansureMemory() { object[] stuff = new object[512]; int count = 0; try { while (count < 512) { stuff[count] = new char[1024*1024]; ++count; } } catch (System.Exception x) { x = null; } Console.WriteLine("There are approximately {0} megabytes available.", count); } Please report the result back to the group! That would only let me know the available managed heap space - I'm assuming there is an unmanaged heap knocking around as well. An official breakdown of memory allocation would be useful as well - ...Show All

• JIM.H. Direct X *.fx Question ?

  Hi all, i have two questions, Please somebody help me. 1. what is *.fx file 2. How to create *.fx file Best Regards, Brian Tsim FX files are where you can define the code/statements that are interpretted by the D3DX "Effects Framework". They often contain vertex/geometry/pixel shader code but can also represent fixed-function configurations. Ultimately they (and the whole effects framework) are a convenience tool - it makes it a lot easier for us developers to abstract out different rendering techniques. FX files can be created in your favourite text editor - there is no special encoding. I personally use Visual Studio - add a text resource to your project and force a ".fx" extension inst ...Show All

• ebeofrei "Casting" Image to Texture2D for proper use in spritebatch

  How can you make a Texture2D from an Image type Without saving it to a file and then loading it - that would be just too sad.. You can't just cast it like (Texture2D)SomeImage. It's really giving me a headache, especially since in assembly it wouldn't at all be necessary to change one type of image to an other - it would just work. I'm assuming you are talking about XNA. If so, posting your question in the XNA forums will get it answered a lot quicker. I've moved this thread over to the DirectX/XNA general forum. Hopefully you will have better luck finding an answer over here. Ah yes, but how do I get a stream of a variable of the type "picture" or " ...Show All

• sroughley Differences in 3D model loading routines?

  If you call up "XNA Game Studio Documentation" and go to these links: ms-help://MS.VSExpressCC.v80/MS.VSIPCC.v80/MS.XNAFX.1033/XNA/UsingXNA_HowTo_RenderModel.htm ms-help://MS.VSExpressCC.v80/MS.VSIPCC.v80/MS.XNAFX.1033/XNA/Math_HowTo_FirstPersonCamera.htm These example programs have different 3D model loading routines. One routine is called by passing the name of the 3D mesh as a parameter and the other routine is called by passing the name of the texture as a parameter. Is the routine that is called by passing the name of the mesh as a parameter better for 3D meshes with two or more texture files In "How to: Render a Model" example program: private void DrawModel(Mod ...Show All

• smilertoo Wav cutting off

  I'm having a problem playing WAVs. I followed the simple tutorial for playing a sound, and it often works flawlessly. However, for some wavs, the sound cuts off early at times, even when only playing once with no overlapping. I would paste in the code, but its the same as the tutorial. I'm wondering if there are certain caveats I need to know about. s Is this tutorial from the XNA docs (sorry I don't have a copy installed on this machine to check, can you believe it my home computer is so old it doesn't even have a 3D graphics card to run XNA on :-) Anyway, if you are using code like: Cue cue = soundBank.GetCue("CueName"); cue.Play(); then at some effectively random point in th ...Show All

• Xelestial Decompilable?

  How easily can the games compiled with XNA be decompiled I know .NET and C# can be easily decompiled, so I'm just wondering. You could also look into obfuscating your assemblies. It won't stop people from looking at the IL (and in turn, have that reverse engineered into a higher level language), but at least it won't make any sense to them :-D Wait wait, how does that even make sense You pay 99$ dollars to share your source code What For a start I'd say grab a copy of the .NET Reflector and take a look at your built game files. Not to be the weenie, but... Isn't it in the non-commerical developers best interest if they can look at other code to learn from ...Show All

• Foxfire Cannot debug content pipeline

  I am having problems trying to debug the content pipeline. Following advice in other posts, I put System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); in my processor code (in the Process method) to launch the CLR debugger. The just-in-time debugging window pops up, prompting me to start the CLR debugger. But when I do, I get an error message saying 'Unable to attach to the process'. I can't manually attach either the CLR debugger or Visual Studion 2003 (enterprise) to any managed process - like to Visual Studio Express or my game. It's going to be difficult to work with the content pipeline if I can't debug my code, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Yes, the CLR debugger in the .Net 2.0 SDK works! And I ...Show All

• pravej Struggling with 3D sound - Anyone got this working?

  I'm getting IndexOutOfRange exception on the " engine.Calculate3DAudio(listener, emitter)" line below. Anyone managed to do anything like this I want my sound to come from a particular point. I understand with my code below that as theplayer moves, the listener isn't updating position (so sounds already started will be wrong), but I need to get the sound playing first! public class Sound { private static AudioEngine engine; private static WaveBank wavebank; private static SoundBank soundbank; private static Audio3DEmitter emitter; private static Audio3DListener listener; public static Cue Play( string name, Vector3 playerLocation, Vector3 soundLocation) ...Show All

• TheMaj0r Problem with GDI+

  Hi ppl! I'm doing the following: Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(@"D:\Temp\SansaBitmap\IMG_0600.bmp",false); bmp.Save(@"D:\Temp\SansaBitmap\IMG_0600_new.bmp"); As far as I understand this should create exactly the same file as it was, but guess what - it creates a file that is 2 times bigger!!! What is the problem How I may create a file that is exactly the same size Best, Telek. And the probable explanation for this behavior is that Save creates a 32 bit depth bitmap and probably your original bitmap was a 16 bit depth one. It was only a part of the code, so I actully intended to use the bitmap. Thanks, Telek ...Show All