Links, links, links!
We'll start with NemoKrad's BoundingBoxes in XNA 4.0
Next, Stephen Styrchak talks about Debugging the XNA Content Pipeline with C# Express Edition and a bug-fix for Debugging Xbox 360 Content
Bob Taco Industries has two blog posts, one about Turning a Solution into a Template for XNA 4.0 and one about Sizing Apps and Games Properly Using the WP7 Emulator
Xna Creator's Club Online released some new samples for Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio 4.0
And Shawn explains the new Dual Texture Effect
Debugging the Content Pipeline : the real deal
Well that was quick: the Visual Studio extensions for debugging the content pipeline have been released!
Debugging the Content Pipeline
Something I always wanted to be able to do was debug the code written for the Content Pipeline, like various processors and importers you might need. I'm sure there are plenty of other people out there who feel the same.
Knowing this, Stephen probably thought it would be a good idea to tease the hell out of us with his Visual Studio extensions that allows you to debug Content Processing of Content projects. Let's hope he releases this soon for everyone to use, because it looks seriously nice.
GPU Geometry Map Rendering, Continued
Dave Carlile strikes again with a continuation of his first post about GPU Geometry Map Rendering. This time, he goes through the whole process of debugging his shader using PIX, and finding a solution to his problems. Read the whole post on his site.
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..).....