My todo list of future blog topics seems to be growing
faster than I'm having time to write them! (maybe something to do with
my being busy working on new framework features instead? :-)
It
occurred to me I should find out which areas people would be most
interested in reading about. Here is my current topic list:
- Cubemaps:
what they are good for and how to create them
- Understanding
texture filtering: point, linear, anisotropic, minification,
magnification, mipmaps
- The Game timing system: Update, Draw,
variable vs. fixed timesteps
- Premultiplied alpha: what is it
and why should you care? (for avoiding fringes around minified cutouts,
or drawing alpha blended things to rendertargets and then correctly
compositing the results)
- DXT compressed textures: what they
are, how to create them
- Managing renderstates
- How to
make aiming feel good with a gamepad: auto-assist, target friction,
reticule design
- Effects as archetypes: is an effect instance a
shader program or a material?
- Speed effects: camera tricks,
motion blur
- Sun effects: lensflare and glare
- Why it
makes no sense to measure the performance of an empty game loop
- Serializing
things with the Content Pipeline (XML and binary XNB)
- Understanding
GPU performance: how do drivers work, why does timing individual
methods not tell you anything useful, how to understand the pipeline and
figure out where the bottlenecks are
Any of those seem
particularly interesting? Any you find deeply boring? Anything else you
would like to see me write about?