The version of Snowball currently on GitHub under the "develop" branch has been split into multiple projects. There is now an assembly for each major piece of Snowball, such as Graphics, Input, Sound. Although this means having to reference more assemblies, the amount of code your project depends on is now smaller. This also makes code maintenance a bit easier as it's more clear now what parts of the library depend on other parts of the library.

The parts of the library which really make up a Game Framework has also been split out into their own library. This allows for using Snowball as a just a simple set of libraries or a full blown game framework, depending on what your situation calls for.

I've now merged the "Shaders" branch back into the "master" branch. All rendering is now based on shaders and no longer on the fixed function pipeline.

The function of the Renderer class was essentially been reduced to pushing data to the GPU and therefore I decided to rename the class to GraphicsBatch. The Begin() overload which would allow you to specify RendererSettings has been removed and been replaced with an overload which allows you to specify an Effect file to use. Also, the DrawLine() method has been removed, although vertical and horizontal lines can still be drawn using the DrawFilledRectangle() method. Better line drawing should be possible through shaders and I hope to eventually make a sample which provides an example.

I've added a sample (pictured above) which demonstrates using a custom shader. By default, GraphicsBatch uses a BasicEffect class which is basically the old way of rendering implemented in a shader.

In order for shaders to work properly when using GraphicsBatch, the GraphicsBatch class must pass a few parameters to the shader. At the moment, this only includes a transform matrix but may include more parameters in the future. The GraphicsBatchEffectWrapper can be used to wrap custom effects which you write in order to work with GraphicsBatch correctly. GraphicsBatchEffectWrapper will pass the parameters to your shader by following a standard naming convention. For example, the transform matrix is passed to your shader through a parameter named "TransformMatrix". You can also write you own class which implements IGraphicsBatchEffect. See the sample for an example of using the wrapper class.

My game framework Snowball is far enough along that small games can be developed with it by now. The basic overall design is now laid out and not too much is likely to change as I'm now developing my own small games with it.

In order to create some kind of documentation on how to use Snowball, I created a Samples folder in the source. In the Samples folder is a WalkingWizard sample. I'm posting this source code here but it can also be viewed on GitHub here.