Graphics

Beautiful bits.

Galactic Trail - A Space-Based Real-Time Strategy Game for Xbox Live Community Games

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?

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What is a particle system?

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

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A mountain!

Here is a model (in .X format and .max source file format) and texture for a mountain, 500x500 meters in size, 100 meters tall.
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Extracting Vertices and Triangles from an XNA Model

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!

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KiloWatt Animation 20080703

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.

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3D Geometry Transform Pipeline Overview

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).

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Using Sleep to Save CPU Cycles

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() :-)

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Make a 3D Game!

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 .

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