XNA at DevDays 09

My final session of the trip had me in front of another great audience. Thanks folks. I’ve put the code for all the demonstrations here.

This is my setup for the presentation. If you want to find the other pictures you might be in, you can find them on my Flickr pages.

After the talk it was off to grab a taxi to the station and then on to a very nice train (they have very nice trains in Holland) back to the airport and a plane home.

I like the seafood bar at Schipol airport. Not that raw fish before a flight strikes me as a massively good idea.

XNA Lerp

I’m going to start blogging things that I find useful, so that I can find them again when I need them. You might find them useful too, with a bit of luck.

Lerp is a new thing in XNA 3.0. It lets you find colours between other colours. You can use it for blending, so that you can create a smooth range of colours from one extreme to another.  It is very easy to use:

Color newColor = Color.Lerp( firstColor, secondColor, amount );

You give it the first colour, the second colour and the amount you want to travel between them, in the range 0-1. If the amount is small (close to 0) you will get mostly first colour. If the amount is large (close to 1) you will get mostly second colour.

I use it to make darker versions of a particular colour, so I can create fake lighting effects:

Color shadowColor = Color.Lerp( objectColor, Color.Black, 0.2f );

This produces a darker version of objectColor. To make it even darker, increase the value 0.2 to a larger one.

You can use this to produce tinting effects too.

Face in the Clouds

I took this picture on the way to the conference centre this morning. I’m sure there is a face in those clouds…

Fun and Games at Geek Night

Setting up the toys

Did another Geek Night presentation. Things got rather frantic, perhaps the result of trying to put 70 minutes of content into a 30 minute slot. Anyhoo, thanks for being a great audience and keeping up.

Hello again

Yes, it’s me.