Instead of casting a ray from the camera to the character, try casting a ray from your character's head (or a point just above it, or elsewhere as appropriate for your game) to where the camera would be assuming no walls. If the ray hits something... stop at that point, and place the camera there instead. Like this: ...

Looks like a job for PIX to me.

It's not a hack. It's the way it works. The full name for an XACT Cue in the documentation is a "cue instance", and that's a clue as to how it's intended to be used: a cue in your code is an instance of the cue in the XACT project. I guess a parallel would be that each spaceship object in your game is an instance of ...

I've always seen it done the first way you suggest: scan the string for special characters, split either side of it, and render each part separately. (I use something like {A} for the A button - if @, what if you wanted to show an email address? But that's by the by). It can complicate your text code, but it's the most flexible way, ...

Part of the reason for the limit is a question of memory, specifically the size of the buffers XACT/XAudio use to store the raw audio data. Recall that when you increase the sample rate, you are reading through more data for each audio frame. If you start requesting more data than is available in the audio packet, you'll get clicks, pops, ...

Quite. I'd stop short of using the word "should" as I suppose you guys know your agenda, and what people are asking for, etc. but I'm just a little concerned that XACT development is going to freeze because people are getting scared off by the initial hurdle, when a similar amount of work as replacing XACT could instead be used ...

I'm also a little disappointed. I've not kept track of XACT 3.0 but there's some cool stuff in XAudio 2 if we could just get to it. I think putting a lot of working into a "simple API" is unfortunate if it means the richer product misses out on development; but, perhaps I would think differently if I'd ever met anyone who ...

That's a bit of a cop-out, though. I mean, it's all true insofar as it goes, but the line "Even if there was a need for what you're asking (personally, I don't think you understand all the details of what it entails)" is a bit insulting to the OP. Other, non-XNA projects can absolutely co-exist for multiple platforms, and ...

A SCR is just an EXE renamed to SCR. :-) You just have to check for the presence of certain command line switches and respond to them correctly. Visual Studio (possibly Visual C# Express as well, not sure) comes with a screensaver project template. Open it up, you'll find out everything you need to know. So you can have an XNA ...

Not in games any more, but I was for nearly six years, until recently.