Because I chose to use Z as the up direction in my world, I couldn’t use XNA’s built-in Matrix.CreateBillboard function (since it thought that (0,1,0) was up). This meant that yet again, I had to roll my own. I thought the code might be useful for anyone trying to do their own billboarding (or doing  Continue Reading »

X and Y have always represented the axis in a plane. To me, when you added a third dimension, it was like stacking planes on top of each other. As you stack more and more planes upon each other, they grow in height. Therefore, it was natural for me to view Z as pointing upward.  Continue Reading »

It’s been a while since my last post – October was ridiculously full of midterms, assignments, etc. I haven’t just been sitting around though, I’ve pretty much made it to version 0.2 of the engine! Here’s what I’ve done: The entire input namespace has been updated to version 0.2 (minus a mouse component), and I’ve  Continue Reading »

I made a ton of progress in the last week. Along with the Visual Engine mentioned in my last post, I finished the Movement Engine. Considering those were my major goals this week, along with cleaning up the last bits of the engine (which I’m doing tonight/tomorrow), I’d say I’ve made great progress. I made  Continue Reading »

I’m part of a University team working with XNA and building a 2D engine around it to support projects in a course. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s also been pretty interesting. XNA is pretty much Managed DirectX redesigned for C#. This includes garbage collection, automatic references and all of the rest of  Continue Reading »