redwyre

So, I’ve been trying to get my Asteroids game (the first game I wrote in my engine, back in 2002) working again.  Since I wrote it, I’ve done a few major changes, and not bothered to keep it up to date.  So, after a number of fixes, I manged to get it somewhat working again:

There’s some asteroids, and the title text.  I have no idea why the text is upside down, but hopefully it will be an easy fix.  The actual gameplay doesn’t work, you just get an awkwardly rotated ship floating off into space.  But I’m looking forward to getting it running so I can fly around and see the cool particle trails I made 5 years ago!

I spent some time playing around with a piece of normal glass, but it turns out that normal glass almost totally blocks near infra-red light! You can clearly see it’s green when viewed side on. However, it is possible to get almost perfectly clear glass that is clear side on. I got a small 8mm piece and tried it.. it works fantastic!

Here’s the setup, I’ve got the leds aimed into the glass, and a bit of foam blocks light leaking underneith the glass.

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When I first got vista, I looked around for some articles on the Desktop Window Manager, since it can do cool things like real-time thumbnails previews of apps. So as I was exploring, I came across the actual API to do it, and there are some functions that can be used to extend the “glass” section of windows when you have Aero on full. This got me thinking, if I could make my window transparent, could I render transparency with XNA? The answer is, surprisingly, yes!

I don’t know if the XNA team did it on purpose, or it just happened to work out that way, but it is possible: