Whenever I had to tackle complicated math in my projects, like calculating the terrain normals for the islands in IslandWar or when I just needed to see the rotation of my models or camera positions, I wished that I could somehow visualize the vectors, target locations and bounding boxes in my scene.
Well, I finally had enough and, over the course of the last weekend, I built
a small GameComponent that provides a very simple interface
by which different kinds of arrows and boxes can be drawn into the scene.
This has proven to be really useful, as I no longer had to guess whether
my math was right and whether my unit tests weren't actually at fault when
they triggered.
Of course, I couldn't resist packaging the whole thing and I hereby make it available to the XNA community. There might be other uses for it -- maybe a beginner who's put off by all the effects, vertex buffers and whatnot he has to write just to draw a simple triangle would enjoy being able to draw some arrows and boxes with plain single-line calls as his first steps into modern 3D programming. :)
You can download it here!
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