Sgt. Conker We are "absolutely fine"

3Mar/100

Shortly Replicated Pancakes

Jim “First Hand Knowledge” Perry writes XNA and Short Term Memory Loss.

Andy “Not Your Father” Dunn leaksprophesies information of XNA 10.5 (hint: it will take quite a few years and the arrival of the Sith Lords before anyone will get their hands onto it).

Richard “Pancakes” Fine works hard and eats unhealthy.

Charles “Picturesque” Humphrey does some aftermath (if you count photo sharing as that) of the MVP 2010 Summit.

If you’re in HR for your company Down Under and want to make one Glenn “Legendary Legend” Wilson unredundant this is the time!

Promit “Keep On Walking” Roy shares progress of BioReplicant, “a completely reactive procedural animation system for use in video games”.

15Feb/100

Tools And Fools

SCENE XXV

The Danger Zone.

Enter Matt “Gone Native” Pettineo.

Matt. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with the various performance and debugging utilities available for Direct3D, and I thought it might be useful to give a quick overview of what’s out there.  I’m sure most people who do a lot of Direct3D/XNA work are aware of these tools, but probably aren’t familiar with all of the really cool things you can do with them.

List the tools to cover.

Start with PIX.

Matt. So at this point just everybody knows about knows about PIX. I mean it comes with the DirectX SDK, for crying out loud.  This handy little program started its like as the Performance Investigator for Xbox (original Xbox, that is) and today is useful performance and debugging tool for both Windows and the Xbox 360. […]

If you’re an XNA programmer I’d recommend checking out my in-depth PIX With XNA article, especially if you’re new to D3D in general. For rest of you, here’s a summary of what I think are the most useful things you can do with PIX:

Get to the metal.

Exeunt.

SCENE XXVI

The VentSpace once again.

Enter Promit “Gone Shoveling” Roy.

Promit. I’m currently working towards the release of SlimTune 0.2.1, which will hopefully happen before GDC. If you’ve been paying attention, that might seem a bit odd to you — 0.2.0 isn’t out yet. That’s because 0.2.0 is the pre-release version, and I need testers for it.

More the details and contact.

Exit.