Quick update

I finally removed all the effects (FX) from my project and moved on to a custom shader system. It is much more elegant and talking about the vertex and pixel shader constants they can more easily be managed like they should.

I implemented basic per pixel lighting without normal maps though but anyway I wasn't into writing shaders as I still need to work on my resource loading/accessing system before I delve more into the graphics.

I must say I like the way you can incorporate your data right into your C# project using XNA and you can provide importers / converters for each resource that will get called when you build your project. As for the shaders I'm using NVIDIA's FX Composer to basically validate what I'm doing and it works like a charm. After that I just break the code into a pixel and a vertex shader and I bind the constants to registers and voila, I got myself a new shader.

I haven't decided yet which route I will take for my lighting system but I've been thinking about it lately. I want something that will integrate easily without having to do complex mesh setups in an external editor. Yet I want to be able to support an unlimited number of lights per mesh. Maybe I just won't, unless I do some multipass techniques... I'll see.

More to come