Part of this requires some 2D Physics, for which I've opted for Farseer as it's a perfect fit with C#, and on the whole it's been pretty easy to work with even for someone like myself who is a complete newbie to this sort of thing [grin]
Something which did trip me up for a bit however was bullets. You see I was creating a pool of bullets to use and then when fire was pushed (thank you SlimDX and XInput) a bullet was shot out into the world from the current location.
All well and good, however sometimes a bullet would get 'stuck' to the player, being drawn but not being updated by the physics system. This puzzled me and after checking my code was correct I took a look inside Farseer to see what was going on.
At which point the gotcha became clear;
Farseer queues up add/removes from the simulation until the next frame and it applies them by first dealing with 'add' then with 'remove'. This is where my code had a slight disagreement with it as I was removing objects and then readding them in the same frame. So, Farseer would add the object and then remove it right away.
My main issue here was I didn't realise the operations were cached until later, so a little reworking of my main loop later to defer returning objects to the pool by a frame and it all works fine.
On with the playing about then...
