I’ve barely had time to look at XNA, but one of the first hurdles I’ve seen so far is loading a mesh in the traditional .x format.

In the past the DirectX SDK’s Managed DirectX libraries contained support for using the .x format. However XNA does not…well, not yet at least. XNA was supposed to include something called the “Content Pipeline”, which would have supported the .x format. However, at the last minute Microsoft held back on including the Content Pipeline. I guess it wasn’t ready for public consumption.

It does support some other format .swm, which appears to be propriatory. Until the Content Pipeline is released (hopefully soon), the work around seems to be to convert your .x format meshes into this .swm format.

I see over at XNA Spot that there is now a converter. It’s on their samples page. I haven’t tried it yet, but fingers crossed I’ll have the ol’ Spitty rendering real soon.

Oh yeah, and I have to learn HLSL too. That’s “High Level Shader Language”.

eeek!!!