What should I blog about?

Originally posted to Shawn Hargreaves Blog on MSDN, Tuesday, July 10, 2007

My todo list of future blog topics seems to be growing faster than I'm having time to write them! (maybe something to do with my being busy working on new framework features instead? :-)

It occurred to me I should find out which areas people would be most interested in reading about. Here is my current topic list:

  1. Cubemaps: what they are good for and how to create them
  2. Understanding texture filtering: point, linear, anisotropic, minification, magnification, mipmaps
  3. The Game timing system: Update, Draw, variable vs. fixed timesteps
  4. Premultiplied alpha: what is it and why should you care? (for avoiding fringes around minified cutouts, or drawing alpha blended things to rendertargets and then correctly compositing the results)
  5. DXT compressed textures: what they are, how to create them
  6. Managing renderstates
  7. How to make aiming feel good with a gamepad: auto-assist, target friction, reticule design
  8. Effects as archetypes: is an effect instance a shader program or a material?
  9. Speed effects: camera tricks, motion blur
  10. Sun effects: lensflare and glare
  11. Why it makes no sense to measure the performance of an empty game loop
  12. Serializing things with the Content Pipeline (XML and binary XNB)
  13. Understanding GPU performance: how do drivers work, why does timing individual methods not tell you anything useful, how to understand the pipeline and figure out where the bottlenecks are

Any of those seem particularly interesting? Any you find deeply boring? Anything else you would like to see me write about?

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