CONQUERING DEFERRED SHADING

Jason Maskell comments about his experiences with deferred shading techniques.

From Jason's post: "... I’ve thought that I’ll probably have to write a material editor sort of thing where my artist can play around with the materials settings until he finds out the right settings to stick in the lookup texture. For instance, he will be putting an index value in the alpha of the texture, which will then lookup into another texture to get 4 values instead of one ...".

Do I see some soft lighting in that screenshot?

BEWARE WHERE YOU INVEST YOUR MONEY

This has nothing to do with XNA, game programming, comic books, nor animation, so its miscellaneous stuff. However, I believe is an interesting read for those who plan to invest their money on capital markets, in particular, in penny stocks.

Kiplinger.com has published an article called "The Truth Behind Penny Stock Spam". What's relevant about the article? That it shows the awful truth behind easy money.

In short, I guess you already knew it but if you want to invest money in capital markets, don't let yourself being attracted by spammers, or companies which you barely know or don't know at all.

Always try to analyze the fundamentals of the prospect companies by yourself (in case the proper info is available), read serious analysts' assessments, study the track record of the company, what it offers, if its a known company or not, who are its directors/owners, where it is located, since when, and so on. Otherwise, you face the risk of losing your money in the split of a second!

I'm not saying that you must play always safe, because as you may know the greater the risk the greater the potential reward ... or losses ... but if you want/need to get some "quick" profit just play smartly and the safest as possible, as I assume you do with any other type of investment, in order to avoid the risk of hugh losses because you actually invested in a "ghost" company.

Take the company mentioned in Kiplinger's article, for instance, if you analyze the quote charts, you'll see that it opened in more than USD 7.oo/share when it was first traded in the penny market and then it just followed a slow downward and almost steady path to the current value of USD 0.04 a share. And yes, you're reading right. From riches to rigs ...

Spooky!

VIDEO: VJ TOUCHSCREEN SOFTWARE CREATED WITH XNA

Ok guys. What I'm going to blog about right now is a very interesting way of using the XNA API for other serious purposes than what it was meant for: videogames -which in turn also shows off the potential of the API, when you use it in a smart way.

Adrew Griffiths and a friend of him were asked to write the software for an interactive VJ editing system for the Ford stand at the Geneva motorshow. And guess what? Yes, you're right! They decided to use XNA for the implementation.

Not a believer, ugh? Then just watch the following video and be prepared to get spellbound:

What did I tell you? So now you're interested ... well, you can find more info about the project here.

Cheers!

VIDEO: FLOCKING ON XNA

Here's an interesting video showing off some flocking behavior of a group of boids, all done with XNA!

You can get to the author's site by following this link.

GETTING STARTED WITH XNA: PRIMITIVES

Brecht Kets has published a series of articles about primitives with XNA.

From the articles: "... A triangle is defined by 3 points, which is defined by a Vector3, containing the X, Y and Z coordinate (3D space), and maybe some additional information, such as color. Such a point is called a vertex. XNA has some vertex structures embedded, and one of them is perfect for this example: VertexPositionColor. So let us add this to our class ...".

You can find part I and part II on his blog.