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After working on the 3D game Ko-Ado the Cloud for the Dream-Build-Play competition, I decided to relax with a simpler, 2D-based game. And what better genre to start out with than the real-time strategy game?

A particle system is something which can be used to make smoke, explosions, contrails, steam, and other kinds of "cloudy" or "sparkly" effects.

Here is a model (in .X format and .max source file format) and texture for a mountain, 500x500 meters in size, 100 meters tall.

Here is some code that lets you extract the vertices and indices from a loaded XNA Model. You do not need to use any special processor, such as the JigLibX VertexProcessor or some derivative of the ModelProcessor -- it works straight out of the box!

This is the second release of the KiloWatt Animation library. It is intended as a companion to the kW X-port 3ds Max X file exporter, to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio.

Geometry rasterization is about transforming vertices, which in the end make up the corners of triangles, which get rendered on the screen (very simply put).

Q: Hey, I'm spending a lot of time spinning in the graphics driver, waiting for a page flip, because I'm v-synced. Wouldn't it be better to Sleep() away that time, to give up some CPU to other applications?

A: That should work, with some caveats. I'm assuming Windows here (because otherwise you'd be talking about usleep() :-)

This is not an in-depth tutorial. It's just a pointer to some other resources I've put together to help in creating 3D graphics for computer games. For an exhaustive set of articles and tutorials, go to GameDev.net .