The issue isn't so much the type of data but how it is stored and loaded at runtime. You can use vertices and triangles, but what you don't want to do is keep those vertices and tringles in a text file and parse and load that text file at runtime. I've been playing with this, trying to avoid the contnet pipeline using text files to store model ...

Yes, use: using System.Text.RegularExpressions; Very easy to use. Pretty self explanatory if you are familiar with regular expressions. I gotta tell you though, based on my experimentation, storing vertices in a text file is not a good idea. They can be suprisingly bloated compared to assets that have been through a content processor. I just ...

It's quite possible to do the reverse, however there are other solutions you could try.The height map is not such a great solution I think, simply because it will be huge and no matter how big it is, it probably won't give you the resolution you need to get an accurate collision, and depending on the frequency of the elevation changes a texture ...

Q1: A clear explanation: A normal is a direction vector. The normals stored in a normal map are direction vectors derived from arbitraray points on the surface of a high resolution mesh. When you use a normal map on a low res mesh, essentially what you are doing is telling the GPU ''When calculating the effect of a light on this surface, ignore ...

W3bbo:But regarding reasonable skeptisim on the publisher's part: whilst Microsoft and other publishers sure would like a demo or full game before considering publishing, they can't always expect that for a propriety platform like the Xbox, they might want an exclusive, for example, and that would require people sending in their proposals ...

1 Dell M1710 Laptop running 32bit Vista with 1.5 gigs of RAM, a 2.13 Ghz Core Duo and an Nvidia 7900 GTX graphics card, my main machine.1 home built desktop running 64 bit Vista with 3 gigs of RAM Athlon 3800 X2, and an Nvidia 7600 GT.An Xbox 360, which suprisingly, I haven't done much development on even after paying for the membership.

Firstly, you can do pretty much anything in XNA you could do with unmanaged C++ and DirectX, but it really is suited for smaller games and smaller devlopers I think (perfect for XBLA arcade and PC download serivces). You can use System with XNA, you have access to the file system in XNA on Windows (don't know about 360 because I haven't tried it ...

Machaira:With other projects that have come up, I've had to put my entry on the back burner. I may or may not get it done in time. Even if I don't get it done in time to enter I'm planning on finishing it and getting it out there to gamers.   I'm in the same boat. My real work got kind of crazy over the last couple months and XNA has sort ...

Maya 8.5 ships with an fbx exporter built in but you may need to load it through the plug-in manger. Don't know if there is a newer one out there, but the one that ships with Maya 8.5 is only like 6 months old it should work fine. Go to the plug-in manager in Maya and make sure fbxmaya.mll is loaded.

kamikazeknutter:I would still suggest looking elsewhere for paralells in game mechanics. Grand Theft Auto by all accounts is a boring game, its the pure excess of violence that keeps it alive, and nothing else. The story is shallow, the Graphics are never more than on-par (nothing spectacular), and the only thing really going for the franchise is ...