No-one is going to realistically offer to guide you on writing your specific program. It's just too big a commitment. If you are going to want to do this in xna, you are going to have to learn to program at the same time and this isn't going to be quick. I think there a better solutions to what you want than XNA that would let you model ...

Animation is another consideration. Draw the character once and then simply pose it to do your running animation. If you decide to tweak your character, just change it once and you should be able to just export the animation again.

I don't think it is off-topic, just a fairly broad question! It's not strictly true that you can scale vector graphics without losing fidelity. Yes, you don't get jaggies but you still need to draw detail in to the object so that when it is scaled up, curves are not shown as lots of straight lines. XNA sort of supports vector drawing ...

The best thing to do is write a simple c# console application and explore these things in it. For example, make a class and name it how you want. Then create an instance of that class in your program. Create two, then three just to see how your class definition is just a description of the class that is used to create them when your program runs. ...

I understand how these analogies help when learning a new concept but be wary of them. Use them as a crutch to get you going but don't get too attached to them, sooner or later you will have to 'kick away' the crutches because the analogies start to break down. This may leave you in the same 'stuck' position when you try ...

I think that just brings us back to the idea that regular expressions are over-engineering here as that last example could be better solved by a simple equality check. I'm not sure on what you meant by wildcards but if you want to search for them at any character position, regular expressions are the way to go.   ^th.e$ ...matches ...

Spartan seems to be also asking how to create references directly within his models to specialist shaders? I can't talk about modelling packages such as 3DS MAX which *may* allow you to specify those directly within your model but I know from my own project one of the challenges is to map from modeller specified materials to XNA Effect files.So ...

In the vertex declaration, Shaw.

Just to bring a little closure to this and supply a happy ending(!), I managed to fix things using PIX.I was sending the right number of vertices and indices and my indices were indeed correct. My vertices were all set to (0,0,0) though. By going into the vertex shader in debug mode, I noticed that the names of the inputs did not match what I ...

John.Doe:but while passing the vertex buffer to the graphic card you will save 1 float per vertex you pass in.Well I hadn't actually got round to changing my float3s to float4s and will hold back on that, bearing the above in mind.