I'm not a working game developer yet, so take all of my statements with some nontrivial quantity of salt: Game development is a competitive and rapidly-changing job market, and none of us can reliably predict what success will look like two or three years from now.  So strictly speaking, nobody can answer your question with any ...

When you notice a game lags every few seconds, are these games creating and destroying lots of object instances each frame?  The pausing you're talking about could be caused by the VM's garbage collector culling unused objects from memory. Can you try some other XNA sample programs from this site and see if they pause or stutter?  I ...

I'm probably only restating advice someone else already gave, but: some part of your pathfinding (undirected graph search algorithm) is devoted to expanding on a candidate solution and queuing each of the 'child solutions' reached from that candidate.  That is, perhaps you have a priority queue of candidate solutions and you pop off the ...

Sorry it took so long to reply -- those answers are even better than what I hoped for! I didn't want to make this topic about me personally, but right now my plan is: finish my Masters, which should give me solid well-rounded Computer Scientist type problem solving abilities. settle on an area of specialization and work toward becoming ...

I'm currently a Computer Science grad student (so in theory at least I ''know how to learn'') and I've been working on teaching myself XNA and game development, such that ideally by the time I've finished my MS degree (2011-ish) I'll have a collection of impressive XNA games and tech demos to my name, maybe even worthy of being published to XNA ...

Indeed.  Any 'for' loop can be rewritten as a 'while' loop. for (INIT; PROG; TERM) {BODY} can be rewritten as: INIT;  while (TERM) {BODY; PROG;} where each of INIT and PROG are statements or statement lists, acting upon the program state via side effects;  and TERM is a statement or expression which may or may not have side ...

I thought I'd add to the above advice:  make their changes also, but I wanted to point out: Boolean check = true; while (check = true) { switch . . . { case 1:  . . . check = true; case 2:  . . . check = true; case 3:  . . . check = true; case 4:  . . . check = true; } } Check is always true!  Your while loop ...

I studied graph search algorithms in class, and I KNOW I can help you find your problem -- but the forum resists my attempts to read your code or to copy it and paste it into a text editor.  There are idea light bulb icons where some code should be.  Could you post your code in another format (perhaps with pre tags) or post it on a web ...

One interesting thing to notice, though, is:  if every grain of sand is an instance of an object, your simulation is keeping track of the identity of individual grains of sand.  You can tell the system ''find the first grain of sand I spawned and point it out to me.''  So you could perhaps store data with each grain of sand, like ...

I'm very much a graphics noob, but I think I have a decent grasp on the basic concepts here. It seems plausible that by manually walking the BSP tree and rendering each piece as you come upon it, you are forcing the 360 to do in software what it normally does in hardware, if that makes sense.  Have you considered processing the BSP tree ...