BarrySkellern

Wordpress - even the freebie one - has quite a good set of tools for tracking stats for page reads, unique visitors etc, which is a handy tool for gauging your visibility. Maybe when you're getting a lot of interest you could consider setting up a "proper" site.

 

One downside of the free Wordpress stuff is that it can take nearly as much time to make it look unique as it would to create a site from scratch. The free themes are nice enough, but they're pretty generic and most of them don't allow a huge amount of customisation.

I broadly agree with Cornstalks' comment, but I feel it's worth noting that XNA is built on DirectX 9, and things in the 'native' world have moved on a bit since then, to DirectX 11. It used to be that case that after learning the XNA graphics API you'd look at DirectX 9 graphics API and think "oh yeah, this must be what's happening under the hood when I use XNA," and it all seems quite familiar. That's not so much the case with DirectX 11.

 

That's not to say XNA won't teach you anything transferable - all the vector maths, mesh structures, texture sampling etc. is common theory regardless of the API you're facing, and of course there's much more to making a game than graphics programming. All I'm saying is that it's somewhat less transferable than it used to be in that specific area.

It's generally a better idea to use int.TryParse(...) to parse numbers. That function returns false if the parse fails so you can take appropriate action. Only use int.Parse() if you can guarantee that the operation will succeed. In the case of user input, program defensively by using TryParse.

In general any point on the surface of the cylinder (radius not being relevant here) can be uniquely identified by two numbers: the distance along the axis of the cylinder and the angle around the cylinder. Those coordinates will range from 0 to the length of the cylinder, and 0 to 2*pi in angle. If you scale them both by dividing by the relevant range you will get two coordinates running from 0 to 1. Those could be used as your texture coordinates to sample the image. You will need to make a choice of which end of the cylinder is the "bottom" (i.e. the end at u=0) and what angle should be the "seam" (i.e. at v=0 and v=2*pi). Notice that the angle coordinates will repeat at this seam, so your texture will have to repeat in the corresponding direction so as not to display a visible discontinuity.

 

For more info, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylindrical_coordinate_system

 

Hope that helps.

Why not download an emulator or two and try out some old games for inspiration? Lots games on, say, Atari ST or ZX Spectrum are small scale and somewhat experimental, just due to the nature of the systems and immature state of the industry at the time they were made. Maybe try to remake something that grabs your attention, something a bit different or off the wall?

I believe the DirectX SDK download comes with a texture tool that can compile custom mipmap levels into a texture (I haven't used it for a long time, but check it out, it might do what you need.)  Otherwise, Google. I just searched for "DirectX texture tool" and got a bunch of useful looking hits.

The zoom-out behaviour suggests that when your cursor texture has been downsampled to generate lower MIP levels the yellow has bled to the edge of the image. When sampled close-up the high-res mip is sampled and looks OK, but from a distance the lower res mip is sampled and the yellow value at the edge is clamped indefinitely. You could generate the mip levels manually to ensure there's no bleeding to the edge, or use address mode set to 'border' and set the border colour to black.