Geodesic Grid
Brian “JeBuS” I-Don’t-Know-His-Last-NameSchaeflein published a multi part article about Geodesic Truncated Icosahedron (part 2 is here, part 3 is pending) in C# and the XNA Framework. Geodisc Truncated Icosahedrons are “a shape made of hexagons and pentagons” that “has as many faces as needed to make it as spherical as needed, like a Geodesic Dome”.
Head over and grok the code for fun and profit.
Also note his disclaimer in the first post:
I don’t claim that my way of programming is the best way. As far as design patterns and whatnot go, my way works for me, and the code gets the job done. If anyone can offer a more “elegant” approach to anything I’m doing, I’m all ears.
Placing a tank on a planet
As part of his Procedural Planets series, Dave takes a break from generating and rendering a planet and instead tried to place a tank on the surface of the generated planet. Read about the whole implementation process on his blog.
Want to get a free XNA book by donating to Child’s Play?
With the release of his new e-book (XNA 3D Primer) MVP Michael Neel runs a limited campaign that lets you get his book for free if you donate to Child's Play.
Of course, you can also get the book at the normal price, but it's still a very nice gesture. Read all about his initiative here.
Enhanced Crowd Rendering in Dead Shift
The guys behind Dead Shift just posted a new video, accompanied by a discussion about how they enhanced a technique for crowd rendering taken from GPU Gems 3.
You can watch the demonstration video below, and then go and read all the details.
SunBurn Framework available Now!
The guys at Synapse Gaming just announced opening up the SunBurn Framework to hobbyists, student and educators.
The SunBurn Framework contains a subset of the great SunBurn Engine, and you can use it to learn, improve your XNA games, or evaluate the API to see if the Engine would suit your needs. You can get started now by downloading it here.
Other SunBurn goodies:
- Ultrahead's SunBurn tutorials: Part 1 and Part 2
- Nick Gravelyn's introduction to SunBurn: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Adding Physics, Using split-screen.
- Matt Bettcher's 3D Primitives with LOD
- Tom's Game State Management with SunBurn
GPU Geometry Map Rendering
Things not always go as smoothly as you want in the world of GPU programming, as shown by Dave CharlieCarlile from Crappy Coding. He tried to move the code for creating procedural planets from the CPU to the GPU, and then posted his findings. It's a very interesting read, and at the end he promises a comeback with more details about using PIX to debug his problems.
More Free stuff
Remember that day when we linked to some free music for indie games? If you do, REJOICE! There's two more packs of free stuff coming from the same guys at Iron Star Media. First, some sprites for particle effects, followed by low poly sports models.
Following a linear progression, the next pack should contain something that's 4D! Can't wait to see what it is...
Oops! 3D Physics Framework – V0.6
Oops! 3D Physics Framework has released an update over on codeplex. V0.6
Codeplex Project Link
There hasn't been an update since Mar 22nd so it looks like a significant update.
Check out the home page for more information
Two Samples For The Price Of One at MJP’s XNA Danger Zone
Over at MJP’s XNA Danger Zone Matt J. Pettineo writes:
Today I have two XNA samples fresh out of the oven: a Motion Blur Sample, and Depth Of Field Sample. I figure all of the kids these days wanna add fancy post-processing tricks to their games, right?
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.