100% Test Coverage
After Markus made flashy statements about having "100% Test Coverage" on his new release of Nuclex, he posted an explanation about what that means exactly, which should help us mere mortals understand it better. Read more on his site.
Nuclex Framework Updated
In Nuclex Framework R984 Released! Markus “Cygon” Ewald announces the immediate availability of the latest version of the Nuclex Framework on CodePlex. Highlights include:
- 100% test coverage of the GUI library (I leave it to the educated reader to determine if that means anything useful)
- Control navigation with the game pad and cursor keys
- The GUI library contains controls for buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, horizontal and vertical scroll bars, text boxes, lists now
.NET Profilers
Suprotim Agarwal shares a list of free and commercial .NET profilers (via DotNetKicks.com) – it features SlimTune by “our” very own Promit Roy (who recently praised v3.0 of VMware Player).
Markus “Cygon” Ewald updated his nuclex.org site. This rather unspectacular news is worth mentioning because your old links are dead now. Seems like the trend Nick “I do not care about history” Gravelyn started some time ago gains some momentum in the XNA GS/FX community…
Scrolls from the Past: PIX
Good evening everyone,
After a long and tiresome day, I come to you now, at sundown, to put some things in writing. Looking through the old, dusty and crumbling archives I managed to collect some scrolls about a very very interesting and useful ritual by the name of PIX. My memories of what PIX stands for are not too fresh (maybe it's yesterday's feast, or maybe not...), but for now I'll just assume it comes from Pictorum Informatias eXtractorum. If you think this is uses to carefully inspect elements of images and artworks created with XNA and that other API (Apparatus Procesarum Imaginus ?) called DirectX, like you would do with a clear and carefully crafted magnification glass, then you would be correct.
The first instructions to use PIX in XNA were laid out by the now familiar XNA sorcerer Manders, in his scroll about a "painless" introduction to PIX, way back in the first year of XNA. Then, two moon later, the grand master wizard Shawn incited our collective minds, by decreeing that PIX is "it is just like totally awesome, dude, and you should definitely try it", but not going into more details about it.
No matter... no matter... This only proved to be a slight delay, because a dozen moons later, Brian son of Richard of the GarageGames clan wrote a detailed and clear chronicle about how he used PIX to get some insects out of some pixels (I don't know why they use words like debug, when this sounds so much better).
In another one of his Scrolls of XNA Recommendations, bittermanandy talked about PIX and why you should use it.
Next, in the spring of this year the great clan and spell-weavers at Microsoft sent one of their own to the Gaamus Developerus Conferentius, to spread word to the whole world about the ritual I cover in this pages. All that he said was recorder for eternity, together with his drawings.
Lastly, XNA wizard MJP of the Mostus Valuabilus Profesionalus kind wrote a long long long parchment where in great detail, the invocation and usage of PIX was described.
And in the end, I dicovered a cache of scrolls in the MSDN library with a great number of tutorials about PIX.
My eyes are getting weary now, but I will not leave before I tell you what we will look at nex... (zzzzzz, snore, zzzzz..).....
Free Music for Indie developers
Iron Star Media just released a few songs that they are giving for free to anyone who want to use them in their Indie Games. Check them out here and see if anything tickles your ears in just the right way.
Light Pre Pass in XNA
Michael Quandt posted an interesting article on his blog about "light pre pass", a technique you can use for lighting in your XNA Game. The technique is closely related to deferred rendering, but with a twist to it: you don't store material information in the G-buffer, but instead use a render target containing lighting information (generated from the light pre-pass) in your material shaders. This has the advantage of a more flexible material system than classic deferred rendering, but it does mean that all geometry will need to be drawn twice.
Michael also promises more articles on this topic in the future, so this should be interesting to watch. You can go take a look at the article here.