Shadows

Well, I got the Project Vanquish shadowing to work right with the instanced trees.  It'd had been more or less working with the terrain.  Turns out the problem, as I thought, was in the shadow map, or lack of resolution there of... 

On XNA and UIs

HTML UI using Awesomium in XNA

A couple of years ago, while working on my old 'Settler' project, I looked around at the state of user interfaces available in XNA, having little interest in writing the nuts and bolts of my own.

There really wasn't that much, a lot of half working and abandoned projects. Some nice things in C, but my preferred working environment was C#. 

Wanting something a bit more useful in a complicated RPG than a simple shooter style interface, I eventually downloaded a trial of the DigitalRune UI library and fiddled with that.  It worked ok... but come a year or two later when I go back to look at my project the trial key has expired, so now I can't run my old code without either getting a new key or hacking out all the UI stuff.

I decided I wasn't going down that road again, so now I was looking for a better way to do a UI.