|
 |
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php
I found these very helpful. They aren't dumbed down like the o'reilly book,
and you get to see how some of the effects like water are made on the chips.
They're a series of tutorials for using XNA, which is the free C# library
that the XBox uses for games (and which will run under Windows too). But if
you ever wondered what a pixel shader was or why you might care, it's
interesting to read. They don't cover any "game engines"; it's just the
low-level "put graphics on the screen" kind of things.
Probably not very advanced for anyone who has ever sent more than one
triangle to a graphics card, but I found it interesting to go thru.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
I get "focus follows gaze"?
Post a reply to this message
|
|
|
|
> They're a series of tutorials for using XNA, which is the free C# library
> that the XBox uses for games (and which will run under Windows too).
I've been tinkering around with 3D graphics ever since the 3Dfx cards with
the Glide API. Programming 3D graphics is never going to be *really* easy,
but the C#/XNA combo is definitely the easiest yet. I get "Server not
found" for your link, but if you get stuck in one particular area there are
plenty of people out there who have already written about the bizarre thing
you can't get to work.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
|
|
"Darren New" <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote in message
news:4b71ccba$1@news.povray.org...
>
> They're a series of tutorials for using XNA, which is the free C# library
> that the XBox uses for games (and which will run under Windows too). But
> if you ever wondered what a pixel shader was or why you might care, it's
> interesting to read. They don't cover any "game engines"; it's just the
> low-level "put graphics on the screen" kind of things.
I fooled around with XNA when it first became available a few years ago. I
liked it, but game-quality graphics weren't what I was looking for, so I
never pursued it. I like making animations, but I wait for them to be
ray-traced right now. I am excited about some of the strides being made in
real-time rendering though, and I wouldn't be surprised to see assemblies
created for the XNA environment that take advantage of those kinds of
engines.
--
Jack
Post a reply to this message
|
|
|
|
scott wrote:
> but the C#/XNA combo is definitely the easiest yet.
It seems to be very straightforward, yes. I find this is true of most of the
.NET stuff - most of it is straightforward, some of it is tremendously
baroque (or just broken), and some stuff seems overly complicated until you
see the use case that needs that complication.
I was more talking about just reading the descriptions of the algorithms
(rather than the code) if you've ever wondered how people do water effects,
or why the amount of memory on your graphics card matters.
> get "Server not found" for your link,
I never had a problem. He has a fair number of broken links, as well as SQL
errors popping up here and there, but I haven't had trouble getting to the
server itself.
> but if you get stuck in one
> particular area there are plenty of people out there who have already
> written about the bizarre thing you can't get to work.
I'm finding this more and more with online help, tho: the information spans
very long. Since there's essentially no cost in keeping things online, one
winds up doing a search for how to (say) get XNA to do something, and you
get pages where people are trying to get DirectX 6 popping up, or 5-year-old
versions of Linux software complaints overwhelming anyone talking about
something new, or whatever.
What I really need to finish my project is a way of getting to the images
from the XBox camera. I looked briefly, and half the people say "here, use
this binary" and the other half say "you can't do that." And most of the
pages, naturally enough, don't have dates on them, or even version numbers.
Highly annoying. I'll start delving into it for real after I actually buy
the camera. *Someone* must be able to get to it, or they wouldn't sell it.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
I get "focus follows gaze"?
Post a reply to this message
|
|
