Nick Gravelyn's Blog

on XNA Game Studio and game development

Change in UIElementRenderer behavior and update to UIElementRendererHelper

A while I back I posted about a UIElementRendererHelper class I had made to simplify life when...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/26/2011

Simplifying UIElementRenderer usage for full-page scenarios

UPDATE: Please see this new post regarding UIElementRendererHelper as it includes a newer version of...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 05/24/2011

WPF Hosting for XNA Game Studio 4.0

A while back I wrote up a method for rendering XNA Game Studio 4.0 content inside of a WPF window....

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 03/25/2011

MediaPlayer changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone

MediaPlayer, the interface for playing music on Windows Phone, is seeing some small tweaks that can...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 03/18/2011

‘using’ IDisposable objects

This isn’t fully game related, but I see so many people posting code on forums that looks like this:...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 12/28/2010

Build-time content pipeline usage in Windows games

One of the problems that some folks have hit in XNA Game Studio 4.0 is not being able to use the...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 11/24/2010

What storage is right for me?

Developers moving across all three of the platforms supported by XNA Game Studio might find...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 11/10/2010

Encoding and decoding images in XNA Game Studio 4.0

In previous releases of XNA Game Studio, there were the Texture2D.Save and Texture2D.FromFile...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 10/03/2010

Don’t build more than what you need

One of the more abstract lessons I learned through making my AppWeek game was to build for the...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/29/2010

Don’t reinvent those wheels

Still continuing on about my AppWeek game, another bit that really helped me out was leveraging...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/29/2010

Batch your polygons

Continuing my little series on how I created my AppWeek game, let’s talk about triangles,...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/29/2010

The delights of DualTextureEffect

When I started on my AppWeek game, I wanted to build the game using the Reach profile as much as...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/29/2010

My AppWeek 2010

As Shawn blogged yesterday, we wrapped up AppWeek last week and got to see a lot of cool games from...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/29/2010

I helped ship XNA Game Studio 4.0

Allow me to be a bit nostalgic here for a post. It’s December 2006 and I’m a college kid in Grand...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 09/16/2010

Rendering with XNA Framework 4.0 inside of a WPF application

First some prefaces: This isn’t any official solution to embedding XNA Framework graphics inside a...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 07/25/2010

Storage in XNA Game Studio 4.0

With the recently released beta of XNA Game Studio 4.0, one of the new changes you may have seen is...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 07/23/2010

Landscape mode in Windows Phone Developer Tools

Remember that thing I said about simulating landscape mode in the emulator? Forget about it. With...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 07/12/2010

Touch gestures on Windows Phone 7

Update: My gesture sample is also now available for download which shows an example of mixing...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 07/12/2010

Simulating landscape mode with the Windows Phone Developer Tools April CTP

The current CTP for the Windows Phone Developer Tools does not include the final scaling/rotation...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 06/19/2010

Platform and Configuration Selection in Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone

Update: D’oh. I just now realized that Michael beat me to this topic five days ago. You can see his...

Author: NickGravelyn Date: 06/19/2010