Microsoft Game Technologies: XNA someting for visualizing Cad-buildings?

• anderspettersson / 100 / Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:08:00 GMT / Comments (1)
• I'm building a Cad like program that visualizes AutoCad models. Right now I’m using a VRML-ActiveX for render the 3D-scene (converting AutoCad DWG-format to VRML-fornat). My current 3d-engine is quite bad at visualizing models more than 20.000 objects.

  I now wonder if XNA can be the solution for me? My program is written 100 in C# (except for the 3d-ActiveX control.) so I really like to use XNA instead.

  Can I use XNA I Visual Studio and insert a XNA-3D-scene in my Form?

  Any one seen any converter from the DWG-format to some format that XNA can handle.

  Hope any have some tips on this…
• Keywords:

  xna, someting, visualizing, cad-buildings, microsoft, game

• http://msdn.itags.org/microsoft-game/244632/«« Last Thread - Next Thread »»

• 1. If you use the XNA Game class, it creates its own form and the DirectX surface will take up the entire form so you cannot easily add other Windows Forms controls. There is a sample on the following blog about hosting an XNA window inside of a Windows Forms PictureBox control, which would allow you to place it and size it as you like, and add other controls, but you sacrifice the features of the Game class, such as automatic GPU device management:

     http://tonigreco.spaces.live.com/

     Also, if you are drawing 20,000 unique objects, then your performance is not likely to be better with XNA. The CPU becomes a bottleneck when you have large numbers of Draw() calls. To improve your performance you would need to either merge some of the objects together so they can be drawn with a smaller number of Draw() calls, or if many of the objects are duplicates of each other, you could use a technique known as hardware instancing. There is a C++ example in the DirectX SDK that demonstrates hardware instancing. You may also find it helpful to read the following forum post which discusses this sort of problem:

     http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1242843&SiteID=1

     kyle_w | Thurs, 13 Sep 2007 14:10:00 GMT |