The XNA Team announces a new set of educational content for XNA Game Studio:

• Artificial Intelligence: Flocking - Learn how to enable complex, emergent behavior in groups by using simple logic.
• Shadow Series 1: Basic Shadow Mapping - Learn how to cast basic shadows on a scene, with a movable camera and self-shadowing.
• Shader Series 5: Multipass Lighting - Learn how to utilize multipass rendering to illuminate objects with many lights at once

Download this content from the Education Catalog, or discuss this content here.

Got an idea for content you'd like to see? Email creators@microsoft.com!

Wow! Looks really cool, thank you very much, guys!

 Shadow Series looks cool too :) Can't wait for new entries in series.

Many Kudos for this set of content ... glad to see a really good implementation of the flocking algorithm :-)

 

Thanks. I will be waiting for this shadow series also.

For those of you who are interested in the flocking algorithm implemented in the artificial intelligence code project, it's based on behaviours originally proposed by Craig Reynolds way back in the mists of time (around 1986). His page is here:

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/index.html

His 'boids' are the forerunners of the Bird AnimalType represented in the XNA code. There are lots of references at the bottom of Craig's page, but some of them appear to be out of date now (try the WayBack Machine at http://archive.org if you get 404s).

I think the code itself is well structured, but it's a shame that there are many spelling mistakes and poor commenting (for instance, the Animal type's ReactionDistance property has a comment of 'Reaction distance' which isn't much help!).

Thank you for the new samples.  I found the shadow mapping especially interesting because I never really understood how shadowing techniques worked, but I know they are an important enhancement to gameplay (better depth perception, realism, etc).  I was wondering if anybody from the XNA team knows where the Shadow Series is going now.  Will there be examples of different techniques or improvements to this one?  How soon can we expect more samples from this series?

nca2003:

Thank you for the new samples.  I found the shadow mapping especially interesting because I never really understood how shadowing techniques worked, but I know they are an important enhancement to gameplay (better depth perception, realism, etc).  I was wondering if anybody from the XNA team knows where the Shadow Series is going now.  Will there be examples of different techniques or improvements to this one?  How soon can we expect more samples from this series?

I'm glad you're liking the shadow mapping sample. We're definitely interested in continuing this as a series. There are many different angles we can take and so I think the right thing to do is get some feedback from you and other XNA creators!

Creators: Is there anything in particular you'd like us to tackle with the shadow series? Let us know right here.

Soft shadow implentation would be a great addition to the current example.

Charles Cox:

Creators: Is there anything in particular you'd like us to tackle with the shadow series? Let us know right here.

 

Well, the most recently techniques for shadows that provides the best results would be nice. ;) Variance Shadow Mapping , Parallel-Split Shadow Maps or Forward Shadow Mapping would be very vey nice.

Good results for example, not with this sample, because it reduces my fps from 180 to 55. Don't get me wrong. 55 fps is still a good place to be, but the amount of lost fps with this sample, is not a good result.

Perhaps if you show us a few ways to create shadow, we would be able to choose the best one for our projects.

 

Thanks

What I would most like to see are improvements to the basic shadow mapping technique that would improve the aliasing seen in this sample.  From what I've seen, the Variance Shadow Mapping technique seems to address this.  On the high end, the Percentage Closer Soft Shadows technique is an extension of shadow mapping that looks very cool, but I think that it only performs well on high-end hardware.  I think that extending the shadow mapping technique throughout the series is a good idea, rather than say switching to an entirely new idea like shadow volumes.

Is there any other shadow technique that doesn't eat as much fps as the shadow mapping does? Even if it doesn't give a AAA shadow look. I would like to still offer  some shadow for a not so much power computers.

Thanks

 

EDITED: Never mind what I said. Because after studing the shadowmapping sample code, I just found out that if I reduce the size of the "shadowMapWidthHeight" const, the fps will increase all the fps that I was loosing. Now I can create a slider to allow the user to change this value to give more details or to remove the details increasing the fps. ;)

Thanks.

 

Charles Cox:

Creators: Is there anything in particular you'd like us to tackle with the shadow series? Let us know right here.

 

Could you also release a version of the shadow sample that doesn't use the Content Pipeline part?

Thanks