CHAPTER 5 ■ GETTING THE MOST OUT OF VERTICES
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5-12. Create Your Own Vertex Format
The Problem
Vertices are used to store data you send from your XNA project to the shaders on your
graphics card. A vertex format contains a description of the data stored in your vertices.
The XNA Framework comes with some default vertex formats, ranging from the simple
VertexPositionColor to the VertexPositionNormalTexture format.
However, if you’re coding a more advanced HLSL effect (such as bump mapping, skin-
ning, particle effects, and so on), you’ll find that each vertex will need to store some additional
information,suchasthetangentinthatvertexorsometimingdata.Packingeachvertexwith
some extra data requires you to define a custom vertex ...