Tuesday 23 November 2010

Progress on the Main Game UI

A really brief update on the UI that will be used in the gameplay screen. Nothing very special to report, I am working my way through XNA and I must admit that while some stuff is extra cool, some bits are getting a bit annoying like trying to use the SpriteBatch class with custom effect. This is more complex than it should be and although you can find some way around the issues and it is rather documented on te web, you just get the feeling that it could be easier than that. It is woth mentionning that I am still using XNA 3.1 and maybe these issues are fixed in 4.0. I'll upgrate to the latest version a some point in time but so far I am glad to be able tu keep using VS 2008 as I am really used to it (XNA 4.0 doesn't install on pre VS2010 to my knowledge).
Also, I am getting a bit worried by the performances, mainly because of the gaussian blur shader that I use in a few places. I could repalce that by a Poisson disk blur filter which I may do after the game is implemented. The way I use the SpriteBatch also seems really inefficient so hopefully there will be plenty of room for optimization without struggling that much.

Here is a video of how it looks so far:


-m

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