Answer Questions

• Wendell Wang SpriteBatch.Draw(..., float layerDepth) No Longer Works For Me

  I guess that the deprecated BeginScene() used to automatically changed some device states in order to make it possible for layerDepth to work. But since that function is gone in Beta 2, I no longer know how to automatically depth order my textures. Is there a set of device states I need to be in to get this automatic sorting If not, I'll just write my own sorting code. Thanks! SpriteSortMode.Textures doesn't seem to work either. I'm currently impl'g my own sort algorithm. Thanks Shawn. I'll try this out. By the way, I absolutely loved your Allegro library back in the day. Ah, it was such a joy to use and make games with :) I was so excited to see you working on this. In fact, it's one of the reasons I initially ...Show All

• Simone1 Official List of Features and Limitations of the various Pixel Shader versions?

  Does anyone know of an official list of features and limitations for the different Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader versions (1.1, 2.0, 3.0, etc) I couldn't find anything on the Microsoft or nVidia web sites or on the web. I don't even know for sure who governs these standards. Thanks to both of you for replying. I did look at the HLSL reference and programming guide but they don't have a comprehensive list. There are just scattered bits that mention different limitations of different versions. That Wikipedia chart is exactly what is needed... thanks Kyle. However, I really feel that Microsoft should make a similar chart to make it official. Also, the Wikipedia chart doesn't show anything for version 1 ...Show All

• billb59 ContentManager questions about device resets

  I am trying to figure out exactly what the content manager does and does not do for you. Here's what I've found. The content manager caches resources http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=886913&SiteID=1 The content manager does not help you load resources in a background thread http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx PostID=966705&SiteID=1 And, from what I can tell, though I've not found anything very conclusive, the content manager will take care of device resets. I've not been able to get this to happen though. Right now, I can move my game from one monitor to another and a texure is invalidated. This is how I'm making the texture.. tex = env.Content().Load<Texture2D>(@"content/tex/white_pixel&q ...Show All

• eddy2705 best way to do 2d parallax floor sprite

  I need to do a 2d parallax floor sprite. (I want to closely emulate the style of an older game). Let me explain. I have a long, short rectangular floor texture. I'm rendering it as a texture on a 2 triangle (to make a square or rectangle) set of primitives, that is normally the same size as the texture, and the upper left corner is mapped to 0,0 of the texture, and the lower right corner to 1,1, etc. What I want to happen is when the screen scrolls to the left or right, the top line scrolls slower than the bottom line, and the lines in between scroll an appropriate amount somewhere in between. One way I could do this would be to draw one rectangle for each pixel in the texture's height, so that each can have a different x position. However ...Show All

• Cheesle xna general/beginner questions

  I had some general questions about xna: Will the final product be something meant for small ISV style game companies (like 3 people that want to make a game) or targeted towards large game outfits Is microsoft trying to open a market for small game people to make games for microsoft arcade Is this something someone who is just starting with game development would be interested in, or be able to use Does it make games that compile on stuff besides the Xbox 360 Will the cost of the final product be very very high, or something like the cost of a vs.net 2005 license Just a general idea would be good. I know these are probably answered somewhere, but I couldnt' easily find the answers. Just a link to the correct answers would be ...Show All

• Joel_F Reading the vertex data from the opaquedata in a content processor.

  My question is really how would this be accomplished I asked earlier how to write a custom processor, and now I've got one, but I'm not sure how to get vertex data, or certain vertices out of the NodeContent and put it into the ModelContent. I'm trying to do this for precisely the kind of thing that was demonstrated in the "Gamefest Content Pipeline Demo" video. I would like to read certain marker batch vertices to be able to give me access to that data for placement of other meshes on top of a base mesh at the right spot. I would be much appreciative for help with this! :) The right way to know that it's a MeshContent is to use " as ". MeshContent isMesh = theNode as MeshCont ...Show All

• JackStri Are there any XNA tutorials that teach PC-specific programming?

  I'm really interested in using XNA and am curious if there have been any tutorials that are PC-specific I'd like to target the PC for my upcoming commercial game. Any help would be appreciated! Almost all of the tutorials are PC specific. One of the goals of the XNA development team was to make sure that the code developed for a game would need very little work to make it work both on the PC and the XBox 360. Just do some searches for XNA Tutorials and you'll find plenty of examples out there. Load up the SpaceWars starter kit and check it out. It works both on the PC and the XBox 360. Tons of community sites are available, just go to one of them and you'll find them all since everyone's been great and ...Show All

• yayomayn Deploying to the 360 question

  In the "Looking at XNA Part Two" video on Channel 9, Frank mentioned that deploying an XNA application to the 360 is only supported via a wired connection(No wireless). Does anyone know if it's possible to have the 360 connect to the internet with the wireless adapter and connect to my local lan on the ethernet at the same time The internal lan I'm talking about would just be the PC and the 360. Right now I don't have ethernet in my room(I just moved into this place and the apartment's cable modem is about 50 ft away. If I could deploy to the 360 without having to pick up 2 50" ethernet cords that would be great. If not then I'll just bite the bullet and get them ...Show All

• SJ0775 xna general/beginner questions

  I had some general questions about xna: Will the final product be something meant for small ISV style game companies (like 3 people that want to make a game) or targeted towards large game outfits Is microsoft trying to open a market for small game people to make games for microsoft arcade Is this something someone who is just starting with game development would be interested in, or be able to use Does it make games that compile on stuff besides the Xbox 360 Will the cost of the final product be very very high, or something like the cost of a vs.net 2005 license Just a general idea would be good. I know these are probably answered somewhere, but I couldnt' easily find the answers. Just a link to the correct answers would be ...Show All

• Elurahu Drastic FPS fall,when rendering QUAD

  Hello guys, I've been working on my 3D directx game for a while and I've recently added QUAD(ship cockpit), inversly transformed to VIEW, so its like GUI. However, I am encountering big fall FPS - well normally my time delay between frames is 17 ms, but when I render quad it jumps to 50 'ms'. What's strange is that rendering tha quad + needed preRender+postRender takes just 6 'us'. So why is there 5000x longer delay. Moreover, I've noticed that I can bypass time delay increase by rendering quad without being scaled and transformed to [0,0,1]=> (further to the front) position - there is no TIME INCREASE...but then the "cockpit image" takes just 30% of the screen and so it is not very realistic. Some info about the imag ...Show All

• Dennis Wang if (XNA < DirectX) { drool; } .... DirectX or XNA?

  I have been wanting to develop a game for a while now, and I am finally getting all my technologies together. Basically, I want to create a simple RTS that models that of starcraft because I am a major fan of that game. The problem is, I can not seem to decide if XNA will be able to do what I want it to do, or will I have to move to DX9c. I want to have multiplayer support as 1 of my big things, since the best thing about Starcraft is it's multiplayer, and I see that XNA does not have support for that sort of thing and certainly not an easy way to implement it. If you have any suggestions I would appreciate them, thanks. PS: My C++ skills are absolutely terrible, so I would probably have to learn C++ to use DX9c unless you can ...Show All

• Tryin2Bgood Attenuation in XACT?

  Hi, I would like to attenuate a sound with growing distance to the listener, very much like DirectSound does with the MinDistance/MaxDistance parameters. I understand that I need to use an RPC for that and decrease the sound depending on the implicit variable Distance. Problem: I would like the sound to be inaudible at distance 10.000 (the DirectSound default). Since the range of the variable is 0 - 1.0000.000, the range 0 - 10.000 is only about 20 pixels wide on my screen. It is impossible to draw a meaningful attenuation curve that way... Question: Can I zoom in somehow Have I missed something important -- David We don't yet have a zoom control for the RPC window. However, if your distance ...Show All

• HelpMePl0x Using XNA with Shockwave platform

  We are looking into making an online mutliplayer game available over the browser. Is there anyway for XNA to plug into a Shockwave player Say for example, we have a game server that will be in XNA, and then it sends it over the wire to a Shockwave player. XNA is purely a display technology ... so you won't be building a game server in XNA. You can however build it in C# As far as plugging XNA into a shockwave player, not possible. I suppose if you wanted to assume that users would have all prerequisites installed (XNA, DX9c) you could look into using ClickOnce deployment ... but it would still more than likely require the user have to install something to use your service. ...Show All

• rogupta Where to upload demos?

  Ok so I have an XNA demo game I want to upload but I don't want my web site to get slammed. Is there a good site to upload the demo to or something like a blog/dowload site that I can start I would like something XNA or MSFT based if possible. Thanks. I wouldn't be worried about being slammed in the XNA community, most of us are beginners here and even the experience joe blogs are very helpfull and almost never negative. Good to you puting your demo game out, I also would suggest if you intend to develop the game further, put it Codeplex , great place and you dont have to release the source if you dont want to, until your ready. One you've put it somewhere put a sticky in this forum, I think Da ...Show All

• yousaid Is adding every asset used to the project a necessity.

  As I ask this, I suspect that the answer may be that I just don't know enough about the content pipeline. In previous hobbyist games I've worked on, it's been common to have a file that specifies a level or UI setup including which textures to load. The game parsed this file and loaded the textures appropriately. This separated the art from the code and allowed artists to modify or create new levels without any work in Visual Studio. My understanding is that any asset that is used must now be added to VisualStudio if it is to be loaded through the ContentManager. Does this mean that when I create such a file which defines a level (including all assets) I must also add all of these assets to VisualStudio This seems.... to put it directl ...Show All