Backed up from a local Blogger export (5964178655084214534/5964178655084214534.html) on 2026-01-01.

I’ve been trying to solidify the look of the shmup game and learning a lot more about how XNA (dx) interacts with HLSL. I have some issues still to work out but I’m almost done with the visual tweaks. One issue you’ll run into quick is having to match your depth stencil buffer to your render target. There are also some issues with texel/pixel alignment (texels align in center, pixels align in the upper left). I did have some glowing bullet trails going for a bit which was nice and I’ll hopefully have more progress to report soon.

Some other neat features that I’ve added gameplay wise are tracking missles and the start of a pretty full featured particle system. The tracking missles and bullets have been refactored to use the same particle system.

On another note, I got my old domain back jrepp.com and am pretty much finished with the migration of my recent content, links etc. I don’t have all the old stuff from the previous jrepp.com (sources, cocoabb, arcane programming docs) but I’ll be digging it up out of the archives to get things cool again. I also plan on writing a few short postmortum articles about XNA development when I hit my stopping point.

My kids are both really into playing the game right now. The key mechanics for them are the “star fox roll” and the debug camera. On a side note this months Retro Gamer has a couple good articles, one of which is about the making of Star Fox which is really a good read.