The XNA Experiment: Terrains

 

Want to know how to get Xbox 360 fanatics giddy like a high school girl? Mention Microsoft XNA and homebrew in the same breath.

There have been a lot of buzz surrounding this game development tool that has the potential to create homebrews for the Xbox 360. Nothing is official yet, but if Major Nelson is already covering it, that’s our cue to pay attention isn’t it?

And one person who did was Justin O’Dell. His blog’s opening is graced by an article about his XNA adventures. He starts off his journey with a tile-based terrain implementation for XNA. Since, I am no developer, I’ll let him do the explaining.

   

“The terrain is split into batches, one batch from every texture type. Each batch has a vertex buffer and an index buffer. It uses quad trees to find which tiles should be rendered. Once it has the list of tiles that are visible it populates the batch’s index buffer. Pretty straight forward, huh? However, there is still work to be done, the terrain could use some tile blending and/or splatting. The terrain also has no LOD code. Its just the same tiles, over and over… no matter how far away they are. Some bump mapping would be just keen! I’m also sure there are other places for improvement. If you make any improvements, please let me know.”

You can download the file through the read link for now, below this article to join his quest for a working homebrew for the Xbox 360 (or at least the beginning of it). After downloading the file, be sure to set your working directory to the “Content” directory so it knows where to load the files from.

Via kukyona

 

Want to know how to get Xbox 360 fanatics giddy like a high school girl? Mention Microsoft XNA and homebrew in the same breath.

There have been a lot of buzz surrounding this game development tool that has the potential to create homebrews for the Xbox 360. Nothing is official yet, but if Major Nelson is already covering it, that’s our cue to pay attention isn’t it?

And one person who did was Justin O’Dell. His blog’s opening is graced by an article about his XNA adventures. He starts off his journey with a tile-based terrain implementation for XNA. Since, I am no developer, I’ll let him do the explaining.

   

“The terrain is split into batches, one batch from every texture type. Each batch has a vertex buffer and an index buffer. It uses quad trees to find which tiles should be rendered. Once it has the list of tiles that are visible it populates the batch’s index buffer. Pretty straight forward, huh? However, there is still work to be done, the terrain could use some tile blending and/or splatting. The terrain also has no LOD code. Its just the same tiles, over and over… no matter how far away they are. Some bump mapping would be just keen! I’m also sure there are other places for improvement. If you make any improvements, please let me know.”

You can download the file through the read link for now, below this article to join his quest for a working homebrew for the Xbox 360 (or at least the beginning of it). After downloading the file, be sure to set your working directory to the “Content” directory so it knows where to load the files from.

Via kukyona