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655 days ago

I am moving my blog / site to a new location: www.catalinzima.com There you will find all my samples and tutorials, and all new stuff will be hosted there. The site has different sections containing tutorials, samples and other miscellaneous downloads. Also, it begins its existence with a new goal: 12 months, 12 samples . You can read about what this means, in my welcome post, here. I hope you enjoy the site. Thank you, Catalin Zima P.S. This blog will remain alive, for announcements and whatever else it will be needed for.

HLSL Learning Resources

673 days ago

In response to some people asking me how to start learning shader programming, I made a list of some resources that could prove helpful when learning HLSL: The Shader Series, found on creators.xna.com are a very good set of articles and samples, that explain the basic knowledge needed to understand and write shaders in HLSL. Shader Series - Introduction Shader Series - Fixed Function to Programmable Pipeline Shader Series - Coordinate Systems Shader Series 1 - Vertex Lighting Shader Series 2 - Textures and Colors Shader Series 3 - Per-Pixel Lighting Sample Shader Series 4 - Materials and Multiple Light Sources Riemer Grootjans also has a series of tutorials on HLSL, which can be found on his site . A very good book on shaders (in my opinion, the best book on shaders I've read) is The Microsoft DirectX 9 Programmable Graphics Pipeline by Kris Gray . I found this book extremely useful, with very ...

XNA 2D Pie Sample

676 days ago

After I've seen some people asking how to do this on the forums, I decided to make a small class that allows us to draw Pies in 2D in XNA. To use it, just create a new Pie2D object. The constructor receives parameters for the radius, angle and tessellation. These can also be modified at runtime, and the shape will be altered appropriately. I made a sample that shows how to use this class. You can download it here: Pie2DSample.zip A pie could be useful in 2D games for various effects, like enemy visibility area, flashlights, shields, etc.

Model Manipulation using the Mouse

678 days ago

A friend of mine asked me about a small XNA sample where he could manipulate a model using the mouse. I made something up quick. It is not much, but I though I'd share it with the community, maybe someone will find it useful. Controls: Left Mouse Button + Drag to rotate the model around the Y axis Right Mouse Button + Drag to scale the model You can download it here: MouseManipulator.zip

Ziggyware XNA Holiday Contest winners announced!

681 days ago

I happily announce that I have again won Ziggyware's XNA Holiday Contest The three winning articles are: 1. Deferred Shading in XNA - Catalin Zima 2. Depth of Field - Kyle Schouviller 3. Shadow Mapping - Andrew Joll I'd like to congratulate all who entered, and thank Ziggyware for organizing the contest.