Well, as you may have noticed from the lack of articles I have had a bit of a break from Britonia in the last three months. I’ve had a few things to sort out in real life, I’ve just brought a house and should be moving in in a few months, and I’ve been sorting [...]

I have wanted to expand on my previous post regarding ‘Cube to Sphere Projection’ for a while now, so in this article I am going to cover how I define the spherical geometry of the planets in more detail.

I decided to write this article in response to a comment by Robert on my previous ‘Ship Lists’ article. He brought up the fact that just calculating the specific physical properties of a ship doesn’t tell the whole story of space flight without first considering fuel and payload. You can read the original comment here. [...]

In this article I’ll be speaking about what I’ve been up to with regards to researching and defining the dimensions and specifications of the ships and engines. I aim to have engines and ship sizes which are both believable in size and capabilities, while not necessarily being so accurate as to be confusing for the [...]

For the last three weeks I have started modeling the first in-game content for Horizons, the ‘Locust MK I’, using Blender3D and paint.NET. This time round, I’ll go over how I am exporting model and opaque data from blender, texturing the model with UV maps and paint.NET and importing them into XNA.

A lot of developers I speak to often ask if I use a form of SVN (SVN wikipedia) and when I answer in the negative, they usually tell me of the benefits of doing so. Now I haven’t used it (much) before and I’ve never really had a reason to, being that I am working [...]

I have been thinking quite a lot recently about some of the upcoming aspects of Britonia, and some of the decisions I made at the beginning of the project.  For a long time I’ve wanted to create a game with a sense of depth and emersion, somewhere you could go and play open-endedly, without a [...]

As with all games, Z-buffering plays an important part when rendering the pixels to the screen. During the development of Britonia I have often run into a problems related to the Z-Buffer, so I thought it would be nice to share what I have learned about them and how to avoid these issues.

This small tutorial is really just an extension of the first article I wrote on 3d improved noise on the CPU. More specifically we’ll be getting it to work on the GPU this time.

In this tutorial I’ll be covering how you can use perlin noise and various fractal functions for generating textures either at compile time or run time. The full source code is provided at the end of the article, but I have tried to write it as such that you can follow through each step and steadily build up your own XNA 3.1 app.