Great, thanks Shawn, I was wondering what the default mode was.  I successfully implemented the bloom component with my particle system now.  Looks really good.  I will be posting my code later tonight.  I bookmarked your site too.  Thanks.

Ah Ok, thanks for the response.  I will take a look at the FX code a little more closely and see if I can spot anything like that.  Thanks.

I was taking a look at the Bloom sample provided here at the creators club.  After doing a little bit of reading behind the bloom theory, there is one question that bothers me and the answer is probably simple.For the sake of simplicity, I will only talk about the horizontal blur effect done in the first stage.  When the sample offsets ...

Exactly what JuxtaDeus wrote.  If you want to extend the InputState class to handle the mouse, you could add a couple of properties/methods to retrive the current mouse position and return true/false if a particular mouse button was pressed.  Then in your game code, do something like the following:if ...

Ah I see, thanks for the image.  Well the 2D camera should do just what you are looking for.  Because you are never changing the drawing position of the background image, the camera takes care of all the work for you.  The 2D camera is very similar to a 3D camera.  It only modifies the VIEW matrix which translates into what ...

I'm not sure I understand what you are exactly asking, but I think what you want to do is have the screen wrap around when the player moves to an area that isn't covered by the background image?  If this is the case, then you will have to do more than just use a 2D camera.  You might want to handle the screen scrolling manually instead ...

Try setting the Copy to Output Directory to ''Copy If newer''.  I find that fixes a lot of problems with the file not found issue.  It seems that sometimes visual studio won't copy the file to the output directory where it looks for the file.  If that doesn't work, I'm not what else would be the issue.

If you want to use RenderTargets, then there is a great tutorial over at Ziggyware (http://www.ziggyware.com) which demonstrates using RenderTargets and applying post-processing 2D effect.Found here:  http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=93The MSDN documentation is failry good for explaining the use behind RenderTargets as well.

I figured there was a more elegant way :)  I think there is also a 2D camera class posted somwhere in these forums that might help as well.

Well a brute force method you could employ would be to keep track of the source rectangle used to draw the background.  Let's say for example that your screen is 800x600 and your background PNG is 1600x1200.  In your code let's keep a source rectangle called srcRect.  As you move the camera, you change the position of the source ...