Catalin's XNA Experiments

It’s been a long time coming, but finally I get the time to explain the technique I came up with for drawing shader-based dynamic 2D shadows. If you want to dive right into the code, you can go to the sample’s page. Still here? Ok then, let’s get started. The core of the technique is [...]

In my efforts to make the shadows soft, based on the formulas for penumbras, I finally realized that my method does not support physically correct penumbra softness, but I will explain the reason for this when I do the tutorial. Until then, here’s what I came up with, after applying some Gaussian blur to the [...]

Those that follow my twitter account have seen this already, but I wanted to let everyone know I’m working on a system for 2D dynamic shadows, again. However, this one is very different from the last sample I made on the subject. In that one, you had to define the geometry of the shadow casters, [...]

Last time, I talked about my experience with drawing and animating 2D images with ToonBoom. In the end of that post, I said that one way to load ToonBoom animations in XNA was to export the animation as a sequence of images, and then load these images and animate them in XNA. So today we [...]

You probably heard by now that XNA Game Studio 3.1 is out. After a quick download, uninstalling 3.0 and installing 3.1, I quickly put together this sample that shows how to use the new support for videos. More info on the sample’s page, here. Or, if you’re in a hurry, here’s the direct link to [...]

As an exception, I will post the sample for now, and come back with the informative and explanatory blog post in a few days, since my exams don’t allow me too much XNA work at once. So the first sample deals with the XNA implementation of something similar to the mouse cursor encountered in World [...]

Yes it can My may sample is also my first public sample written in XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP, and it shows how to restore the depth buffer from a depth texture. This way, models drawn to a render target, with post processing applied to them can intersect and obscure normal models, drawn after all [...]

I finally finished the April sample. I know it’s May already but the MVP Summit and the Easter Holiday took most of this month So for April we have Dynamic 2D Shadows. Check it out in the Samples section, and let me know what you think. Or download it directly, here. I hope you will [...]