Compressed data is a great thing, especially when the GPU hardware is able to decompress it for free while rendering. But what exactly does vertex data compression mean, and how do we enable it?

XNA defaults to 32 bit floating point for most vertex data. For instance the VertexPositionNormalTextur…

Consider the flow of data through a typical game:

Customer downloads game from Marketplace

Game data is stored in the filesystem

Game loads the data

Data is stored in memory

CPU or GPU fetches data from memory

CPU or GPU does awesome cool stuff with the data Making the data smaller has benefits …

Back in 2004 I wrote an article for a book called ShaderX3 about how to tackle the shader permutation problem by automatically generating shaders from combinations of smaller code fragments.

Now Tim has created an XNA 4.0 implementation of this same idea. Sweet! (not to mention very flattering f…

I have a theory that agonizing over difficult decisions is always a waste of time.

To decide between two or more options, we must predict how good an outcome each choice will produce. Decisions are only difficult when this is an approximate estimate, because if we knew for sure, we'd just pick the…

I find it fascinating to watch how different programmers tackle problems in different ways. Some like to think things through until they fully understand the optimal solution, then code it up in one quick burst. Others prefer to get something up and running as fast as possible, then iterate to grad…

PDC talks are now available to download in WMV or MP4 format, as well as for online streaming.

Mine is here:





Source

Goodness from Stephen.

(more info about it here)



Source

Check this out.

It's a book.

It's about programming Windows Phone using Silverlight and XNA.

It's by a hero of mine.

And it's a free download!







Source

As if live streaming of my upcoming PDC talk was not enough, I'll be doing a Q&A on Channel 9. Friday October 29th, 10:00 AM PST.

If you have questions you'd like me to address, tweet them @ch9live, or submit a question into the PDC10 Session Q&A panel on the right hand side of the video …

A screenshot of the demo from my upcoming PDC talk:





Cats are of course to be expected from me, but this year there are dogs too!

Day after tomorrow, live streaming from http://www.microsoftpdc.com



Source