What a sad month for those of us who program computers.
Take a moment to reflect on this paper, published in April 1960:
No provision need be made for the user to program the return of registers to the free-storage list.
This return takes place automatically, approximately as follows (it …

A simple test
Load the Silverlight 5 port of the XNA bloom sample (which you can find in c:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft SDKs/Silverlight/v5.0/Toolkit/Sep11/Source/Sample source code.zip/Xna after installing the Silverlight toolkit). Run it, and observe the shiny tank.

Now open up MainPage.xaml…

One thing missing from the new 3D functionality in Silverlight 5 is an equivalent of the XNA Game class. I previously wrote about how to provide XNA style Update and Draw methods in a WinForms environment. What is the Silverlight equivalent of that?

After installing the Silverlight Toolkit, crea…

Could this be the first ever 3D Silverlight game?

My colleague Ito ported the rail shooter that he originally wrote for AppWeek 2010 to use the new 3D features in Silverlight 5. First get the SL5 RC plugin (if you don't have it already). Then play the game here.

Once the intro animation finishe…

I have been remiss in not mentioning this on my blog before, but if you are an XNA developer who hasn't been paying attention to Silverlight 5, now might be a good time to start!

A quick history:

• At the MIX11 conference in April, we announced that Silverlight 5 was adding a new 3D API. This is based…

(shamelessly stealing the title of a post by my colleague Aaron)

In fact, why don't I let him provide the content as well as title:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2011/07/07/10184338.aspx



Source

Recent silence notwithstanding, I'm still here, and will have more to say about aliasing as soon as I find myself less busy!

In the meantime, check out this latest App Hub release: http://create.msdn.com/en-US/sample/xnb_format

This article documents the format of the compiled data files (.x…

My colleague Reza recently started a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rezanour. He already has some good posts about vector math, and is a smart guy so I'm betting will be writing many interesting things in the future :-)



Source

Back when multisampling first showed up, GPU hardware was slow, so triangle counts were low. Complex curved shapes were approximated by a small number of faceted triangles, each of which was big enough to cover many screen pixels.

This created an odd situation where early articles about multisamp…

Alpha cutouts (where you use the alpha channel of a texture to determine the shape of a sprite or billboard) are the cause of many an aliasing problem. There are basically two ways to do alpha cutouts, both tragically flawed.




Alpha blended cutouts
As long as you start with high quality source …