I understand the effect you're after - a consistent transparency throughout the blocks. Craig's suggestions of using the depth buffer (write enabled) to prevent the underneath objects from drawing should work, but I'm not sure how the depth buffer functions with SpriteBatch. Another option would be to draw all the blocks opaquely ...

And the lesson is: Use source control or at least back up regularly. If you still can't find the file, there may be a ray of hope. System Restore _might_ have saved a copy of your file. I found this out one day when my work PC went into a boot loop and the IT department used System Restore to roll it back. I discovered that a couple of my ...

One way to go is to make use of the new Automatic XNB serialization. This means you don't need any content readers or writers. When I first started out doing this, I tried to make all my game objects (de)serializable. I soon decided it was too much of a headache: worrying about shared or circular references and initialization steps. I decided ...

[quote user="Nick Gravelyn"]You could support multiple code paths[/quote] ContentTracker does this internally for textures (with most file types supported), Intermediate Serializer format Xml (if you have XNA GS installed) and even X files! (if you have SlimDX installed). I explained it a little more in this thread too.

[quote user="Roonda"]when I need to call Guide.BeginMessageBox (eg for when the storage selector is cancelled), I give it the PlayerIndex that last registered input.[/quote] Aaargh. I think I'm going to have to change this. When I pop up the storage device selector automatically at the start, it works for all players. Then, if I ...

[quote user="Spyn Doctor"][quote user="Raining Talent LLC"]My game is an online only game, meaning a signed in player with gold is required to play. Should I allow or not allow a non-signed in gamer to use a signed in gamers profile to allow him to play from another controller?[/quote] As Pino said, the majority here says no, ...

One way that works a treat for me is to use ContentTracker (see sig). It's a wrapper for the default ContentManager. If you enable Source Asset Loading, it will look for file types other than xnb and load them using provided methods. Basically it means you can do this on both PC and Xbox: Texture2D blah = ...

I think I'm having a similar issue with predicated tiling. It appears as though the screen space distortion is being split into two renders causing it to tear horizontally. See this image. I'm testing using a VGA display and outputting it's maximum resolution (1680x1050). When I turn off PreferMultiSampling, the tearing goes away, but ...

Do you mean you intend to make your editor completely inside 3dsMax? If not, I can't really see why you'd want to do this. Maxscript is built in to Max - I'm prepared to stand corrected, but I don't think there's any nice way to rip it out and use it outside of Max. To do any integration, you'd need to write a parser ...

1.- Not sure. Perhaps some of the helpers are ending up as bones? There is a bone count limit (around sixty if I remember correctly) in the kW skinned shader, so this could be causing the crash. 2.- When using kW, you can assign a DirectX material (fx file) to your model. If not, there is a content processor parameter for overriding the fx ...