And I can't wait until it does! It's undeniable that Microsoft has been successful because they have always catered to the developer. More developers drawn to a platform means more end users need that platform. Managed code can greatly improve developer productivity, and with a small bit of knowledge on how it works is only a few percentage ...

The @ thing is just one of those things you stumble on the first few times you see it... Try searching for @ on Google and see if you get any results. Just this morning I sat and stared at ^ which I forgot (or more likely, never knew) was Xor. Red faces all around, no sweat. :)

Bounding boxes are far more complex than bounding spheres. A sphere can be entirely represented by a position and a radius, whereas a box usually contains a position then 8 offsets for the vertices, and often orientation information as well. The equations for detecting collisions with spheres are as simple as checking the distance between 2 ...

OpenGL may be portable but has a relatively poor track record for commercial success. It would be interesting to see why that is, and I hope I didn't just start a /. 0p3nGL is teh sux thread. ;) In addition to the OO vs. Procedural stuff above, OpenGL concentrates heavily on the concept of pushing and popping transformation matrices onto a stack. ...

The @ sign means to ignore any escape sequences in the string. The ''\'' character is what sets off an escape sequence so to actually have a ''\'' appear in your string, you have to use the escape sequence ''\\''. There are a few others you may have seen, like ''\n'' for new line. @''Content\Models\p1_wedge'' is equivalent to ...

Scripts are fine and dandy and at the end of the day, working on a commercial project, most likely the way to go. The point of this thread was that XNA (which is great! don't take this as bashing) is being touted as a way for ''hobbyists'' to get into the scene, but writing scripts to import and export models is still a pretty steep learning ...

I don't have the exact answer you're looking for (sorry) but it might help you to search the net for ''ray casting''. It's got to have something to do with multiplying by inverse view / projection / world matrices to get a vector that goes into the screen at the same angle as the projection. I know the DirectX SDK has a ''Pick'' sample ...

Depending on exactly what you want to do, this could be more complex than that. I did a particle system a while back that holds all of the vertices in one vertex buffer. This is a little outdated now because it's much more fashionable to do all the transforms in a vertex shader, but it sounds like the beginnings of what you want to do. The thing ...

Very cool and much appreciated! Thank you!

I'll bump this. :) I posted another thread (http://forums.xna.com/thread/8083.aspx) asking how Microsoft created their skinned models... There is a solution out there somewhere!!