I post to twitter as a sort of side-thing for smaller updates to complement my XNA tutorials site: http://www.innovativegames.net http://www.twitter.com/InnovativeGames

You may want to look through some of the tutorials on the site linked in my signature. I have a big long series on structuring a game/game engine. Even if you don't follow them all the way through, just looking over them might give you a nudge in the right direction. Hope this helps

Are you setting all your effect parameters correctly? Are you using RenderTargets, HDR, Alpha Blending, etc or just those effects? What is your near-z for your projection matrix? Can I see your effect file? Also, run it without Ctrl, just hit F5 and you'll be able to debug.

I looked at tutorials online and for a while I was confused, but over time I started to get a good grasp of it. It took me about 10 months to get that understanding, but there is still alot more I could learn. You should check out: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/333.aspx

I've got one here too: http://innovativegames.net/blog/xna-game-engine-tutorial-series/ Be mindful that those are just tutorials, as are the ones at Running on Empty. They arent full game engines. They dont have editors, etc. If you don't know how to program, these tutorials likely wont help you get your game made. You should really ...

Have a look at this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timers.timer(VS.71).aspx

http://www.innovativegames.net/blog/game-engine-tutorial At the time of this posting, it's a 10 part series on game engine development, including physics, terrain, cameras, etc, with more on the way.

The textures change each frame, so that won't help. I need a fast way to clone a texture while drawing.

Hi, I'm working on a shadowing system and I need to be able to save a copy of a Texture2D to another Texture2D object. Setting the second texture to the first just creates a reference to the first. I need to actually create a new object with the same data as the first, so I can work with the first later without messing up the second. I've ...

What you are looking for is an arc-ball camera. It follows a point and allows the camera to turn around it. Here's a link: http://www.xnawiki.com/index.php?title=Arc-Ball_Camera What you want to do is feed it the position of the ship to the targetposition value, and update the rotation value with mouse input. Then when drawing use ...