It's getting close to another year since my last blog post, so for anyone still out there I thought I'd put up this little video of a pet project I've been tinkering on. It simulates how Foucault's Pendulum behaves at various latitudes. In case you're wondering what on earth Foucault's Pendulum is -and if you'd actually want to know- you can find more information over here and this here book provides a well-written history on the subject. The short and sweet is that this Pendulum device demonstrates that the earth rotates, which is a pretty neat feat. To get on with the imagery, here's that video:

I'm still tinkering on XNA3.1 so I won't bother you with the hideous source. I'm really not up to speed on the more recent XNA developments, so I have no clue if there's any need out there for another rant on how hard spheres are to texture correctly, or some info on how to paint on your meshes like the pendulum is doing. If there is however, drop me a line and I'll try to put together a tutorial explaining the technique (could be a good reason to finally upgrade to XNA4). And it might be nice to have some fresh content on the site again :)

I've been working on a soft body physics demo (more details). I haven't had time to write up more about it to post here, but I wanted to try to see if posting YouTube videos works on this infernal blog software. Stay tuned for more on this :)

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' :)}