Previously in Use The Right Tool For The Job, I posted about using memory profiling tools on Windows to find those insidious memory leaks and unwanted allocations in your Windows Phone games. That post was written right around the time Continue reading
In the game I am currently working on, I was under the belief that I had no (or very few) memory allocations at run time. And this was true for the most part. The memory allocations that were still occurring Continue reading
Asynchronous content loading is a technique employed by most of the larger XNA games to provide some animation or feedback during load times. This is usually done by spawning a thread where content is loaded as normal. If you want Continue reading
I love Windows Phone. I think Microsoft have done a great job in developing a new user experience. It is not all perfect though. One area where it is up to the app developer to fill in some blanks is Continue reading
We had all heard of the upcoming SIMD support in Mango and how it greatly improved the performance of XNA’s Vector and Matrix types. What we didn’t know was that it is not enabled on your game by default. Read Continue reading
As a general rule, I use DXT compression for textures applied to 3D objects but avoid it for anything that needs high quality and high contrast, such as user interfaces. The default XNA texture processor offers the Color format, which Continue reading
As a general rule, the main or UI thread should never open, read or write any file. File access is always so slow that it will stall the UI thread. So most games will load their content on a background Continue reading
Do you find that you sometimes need the game’s GraphicsDevice, but the Game instance is not easily available? Do you have a ContentManager instance handy? If so, you can easily get the GraphicsDevice from the ContentManager.