Things are coming along nicely with Guardian. The Dream Build Play entry deadline is fast approaching, but I think I’m in pretty good shape to get my entry completed. The video shows most of the functionality. Pretty much all that’s left now is fleshing out some of the graphics, and adding a few more weapons. Then I can start getting some sleep.
Here’s a video of the XNA game I’ve been working on. It’s a port of the iPhone version with some additional functionality planned.
Someone over in the XNA forums asked a question about how to make sprite explosions like those in the old Defender arcade game, where the sprite is broken into pieces and exploded everywhere.
So we finally come to the last post in the horizon culling series. Previously we’ve discussed what horizon culling is and some reasons for using it. Then we went through the math involved in determining the angle between a line from the camera to the planet center and a line from the center to the point on the horizon.
In my previous post on horizon culling we talked about what horizon culling is, the reasons one might want to do it, and went over a simple C# vector class. In this post we’ll take a look at the math we’ll need to use.
In 3D graphics, a technique that’s often used to improve performance is called culling. Culling means to reduce the population of a wild animal by selective slaughter. It also means, and this is the definition we’ll be using here, to select from a large quantity. For Horizon Culling, the large quantity we’ll be selecting from is the tens of thousands of triangles used to draw a spherical planet. And we’ll be using the horizon to determine which triangles to cull.
I’ve always considered programming an art form. As a result, I try to create code that is clean, readable, and easy to follow – just the way I like my art. I don’t like crappy art, and don’t like crappy code either.