XNA only seems to work with physical drives.  Mapping your working folder to a network drive results in content compiler errors.  It’s pretty dumb that content needs to be “compiled” in the first place, but it’s just another one of those awkward hacks to circumvent the lack of run-time performance of C#.  I keep hoping that M$ will just let developers work in a language that makes sense for performance critical software like, oh I don’t know, games?!?

Example: Mapping C:\MyCode to Z:\ will allow your code to compile, but your custom content pipelines will fail.  Bug? Probably…

It sounds like the beginnings of a cliche jRPG, asking profound questions like, “what am I”, but I am quite serious.  I have to stop and ask myself this question on a monthly basis.  My responsibilities tend to involve the full spectrum of technical and business aspects of the company.  Ultimately, this leads to a constant conflict of interest.

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I can remember a time, not too long ago, where Epic was in a very public dispute with Silicon Knights, the developers of Eternal Darkness and Too Human.  From the beginning, it seemed a bit silly to me.  I mean, they knew what they were purchasing at the time of sale, so why all the fuss?  Well, I have recently learned that you don’t have to look beyond your own company to see the same kind of bickering.

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For some time now, I’ve been using stencil shadows as my go-to solution for shadowing characters and environments uniformly.  More recently, I’ve decided to abandon stencil shadows and start researching shadow maps more in depth.  It is kind sad to see hundreds; potentially thousands, of lines of code being deleted.  The two techniques are so drastically different that it is nearly impossible to re-use any part of the stencil code.

Various Stencil Shadowing Code Snippets; gone.

• Generating and store edge lists and connection information per model.
• Dynamically re-calculating face planes for each triangle.
• Silouette detection and volume edge extruding.
• Dynamic volume construction with near and far caps.
• Precomputed optimal shadow volume construction during map export.
• Stencil shadow volume rendering code, z-pass and z-fail.
• Numerous stencil shadow hardware optimization features (z culling, light clipping, scissoring).

All of these features will likely be replaced by 1 source file that generates a depth texture from the visible geometry.  I wonder how many hundreds of hours I spent writing and debugging all of that code.  It’s insane, but it was a fun lesson to learn.  Now it’s time to leave the legal baggage behind and move on to a more common industry standard.

I must say that I am a bit confused about something.  I do wonder if it is common for a person to receive additional responsibilities as they are promoted, or simply receive a new set of responsibilities.  Even if the new set is larger than the old (something to be expected with a promotion), one would expect that some older responsibilities would begin to shift away.  Currently, I am in the middle of many responsibilities, but it didn’t always used to be this way.

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I had to step away from the writing for a bit.  It was stressing me out, and that doesn’t make for fun reading.  I am certain that I’ll pick it back up again, but I had to go back to the thing that makes me whole; the thing that calms my nerves.  I started thinking about code again.  My recent tasks at work got me thinking about my own engine, and it’s current state.

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