Next Episode is Coming

Posted in Particle Engine, XNA on May 02, 2008 at 12:02pm.
There are 6 comments.

Sorry for the huge gap in the second episode. I originally had recorded the first three episodes so as to avoid this, but then I decided I didn’t like the path I had taken with them at all, so I wanted to re-record. Unfortunately between my job, interviews, a friend coming out to visit this weekend, and GTA IV I really haven’t had time to sit down and really work on them. I’ll try and get some more done some time next week when I get a chance.

Thanks for the patience!

Particle Engine Episode 1

Posted in Particle Engine, XNA on April 26, 2008 at 3:42pm.
There are 3 comments.

First episode of the particle engine series is now available for you to download. We just cover the basics of what a particle engine is, set up our solution for the tutorial, and get a real basic particle system implemented from within the Game1 class.

Video: Particles01.rar
Project: ParticlesProject01.zip

Almost Ready

Posted in Particle Engine, XNA on April 25, 2008 at 10:38pm.
There is one comment.

I’m getting almost to the point of releasing the particle videos and wanted to let you all know that I am sticking with .RAR for the videos this time around. They simply compress way more (30-40% smaller) than the ZIP compression. So if you don’t have a way of decompressing these, take a moment to install WinRar. It’s great software and it integrates right in with Windows Explorer so you can just right click on RAR files and tell it to extract it. It’s truly a great product. Just wanted people prepared for when I finally stick the videos up next week.

The Next Mini-Series

Posted in Particle Engine, XNA on April 23, 2008 at 9:52am.
There are 6 comments.

I’ve decided what my next mini-series of video tutorials will cover: particles. It’s something I’ve wanted to play around with again so I figure I can bring everyone along for the ride. It will most likely be 2D for the most part, but I will also show how to make your particle system easy enough to switch between 2D and 3D without much problems. We’ll be using SpriteBatch at first and possibly move to point sprites or a custom quad system for rendering. The physics of the particles will start off as C# but I’d also like to cover how to offload that to the GPU to save some CPU time. I’ll cover how to create a managed resource pool so that you avoid creating garbage. Also, for good measure, we’ll go over HLSL a bit including how to do cool effects on the particles and, while we’re at it, some post-processing techniques. And probably lots more as we go.

I plan to start working on it tonight, so expect the first video within the next week or so. I’m going to try and get ahead of release schedule so that way we have a more consistent (and closer together) release schedule.

So let me know what you think in the comments! I want to make sure I make as many people happy with these videos as I can so your input is important (even if I don’t always have time to respond).