Since I began writing my small XNA demo, I knew that, because of my obsessive-compulsive mania for software architecture, I'll have to rewrite the whole thing several times, eventually ending up with a full scale engine... Well, here goes chapter 2 of "XNA engine architecture". 
As the rewrite I did during this week is pretty big and complex, I will split the "game engine" topic in a series of 3 posts. Let's start with the most important subsystem: the renderer.
After giving a look to the architecture of the game's renderer, now we'll see how the objects of the game will be organized. (more...)
As seen in the previous article about the rendering subsystem, drawing operations are incapsulated inside a "RenderOperation" class. Each instance is queued by the renderer and sorted in order to prevent graphical artifacts (and to improve performance). (more...)
Yesterday I gave the last finishing touches to the code and submitted it for the contest. The final code not only features a semi-serious rendering engine, it also includes chainable post-processing effects, particle systems and nice looking shading effects (per-pixel lighting, normal mapping and so on). And a nice game on top of it!
I'll go on posting more articles about how I implemented the engine and other details in the next days, so stay tuned until May 16th for the results of the contest. I'll also publish the game after cleaning it up a bit.
An animation subsystem is an useful component of a game engine, that can be very handy when writing the game's behavior without having to hand code everything. In this article my engine will get a basic animation framework: not an extremely complex one, but enough to create some nice effects. (more...)
Since the objective of the contest is to recreate a nice-looking solar system, an effect I really wanted to implement is sun overcasting, that is the effect of the sunlight glowing inside objects appearing in front of the sun.
The same "overcasting" effect is seen in the Gothic 3 engine and looks really great.
Last friday the contest ended and the winners were announced. Unfortunately, I didn't win the Xbox... 
But - with just 2 points less on 192, it was a close call. That also means I won't get Grand Theft Auto IV until it's published for PC and that I'll divert my money in getting a Wii someday.
I will go on writing posts about the game I created for the contest during the next days (I'm a bit busy with exams lately) and will publish the source code very soon.
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