I haven't gotten around to writing interesting samples or uncovering any deep XNA truths lately. Instead I've been tinkering on a little beat-em-up game with stylized stick men to do the fighting. These little actors are entirely procedural, so the game itself generates the geometry and animations rather than using models created by artists. Obviously nothing can replace a good artist and this proved painfully true when it came to the animations.

Foregoing lamenting my own slacking, I want to point everyone who cares to read this to a great online resource I stumbled upon today:

A free online book called "Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel shaders"

It is geared towards D3D10, but it contains an incredible wealth of information about nearly every graphics topic you'd want to implement. The concise and thorough theory certainly holds for XNA and most shaders should give you a good idea how stuff gets implemented, if they don't work out of the box. It's written by these guys, who deserve a truckload of cookies in my opinion!

_{Oh and Jack, if you ever should find your way here, we have to discuss your definition of 'not very active' :)}

On my favorite GameDev forum a lot of threads seem to be popping up from beginners worrying that getting started in game development, even as a hobby, is Hard. Lacking anything really useful to talk about at the moment, I thought I'd write up some points about this.