Hi. My question is regarding the kind of connection that can be made within external databases:   Do I can keep some sort of Leaderboard somewhere on the web and make a game update it? Reason to ask: The idea is use a "XNBded" xml file that the game can read containing the LB status. Does MS allow the 360 games to ...

@Billy Boy: Well, a skinned model IS a model animated by bones, so if you have a character moving arms and etc, your content processor should be reading the bones, anyway, your skeleton should contain objects that are doing the "bone" role, you just need find the type and their names. My code just gets the 0,0,0 placement of the item and ...

Nice spoiler! And thank you for share... :D I'll keep this info near to the case in someday I got my fingers on the Pro XDK where maybe this is exposed. I understand that we'll look to features by different viewpoints, you like library provider team member will target consistency, while I'm just interested in put my game up fast, ...

Thank you by the explanation, Shawn. Well, when I told about a ResolveDepth( ), I meant get the surface content like you do with the BackBuffer "also a surface" with one of the allowed DX color formats I guess. Nice to know that is difficult because is difficult to predict how the hardware stored the info (so my question is ...

This is exactly what I'm talking about: How to avoid 1 render call on all visible objects and the depth test just to get an information that is already there. I did look first on the Depth Texture Sample, but to follow that steps we'll need: 1 - Test for formats, sizes and everything. 2 - Create the Render Target 3 - Create ...

This is the trouble, in DX we can create textures from Surfaces... A backbuffer or depthbuffer is a Surface, I inserted a break point to watch all the components of Graphics Device and inside the DepthStencilBuffer in a Non-Public Member there is a pointer to a IDirect3DSurface... It exists and is already there. Probably other XNA objects ...

Greetings... I got a question while dealing with Depth Buffers. Why we need redraw the entire scene to get a Z texture? By what I seen, the default Render Target already has a Depth Buffer (probably a DX surface of some sort), so would be faster just flush it right to a Texture2D than redraw a fake one, repeating calculations already ...

Hi. I'm working on a game like everyone here, I can't deny that I learnt a lot from here, so I felt that is my time to try give a small contribution to pay back all that I learnt, hope that this helps someone. I warn that there must be some other ways, this one is just a solution that I got hacking some matrices and experiencing, ...

Greetings. I would like to get advice about Pix usage, I'm in doubt about if "make our app run under pix" is a real need or just needed when we need to debug something that we can't find on VS. I'm avoiding usage of DXUT, so, was really cool get everything working without the lib, but, on the last week I got ...

Greetings. I’m designing a class to deal with animated characters, until now I successfully loaded the char, hierarchy, etc. The next step will be implementing multiple animations. It’s my first time programming, so I’m not so much experienced on topics like memory management and performance, but by logic I suppose that deal with such issues ...