I want to know how to remove part of a Texture from a Texture2D. I have a simple game in which I want to blow up a planet piece by piece, when a bullet hits it "digs" into the planet.
The physics are already working but I am stuck on how to cut the texture properly.
I need to create a function that takes a Texture2D a position and a radius as input and returns the new Texture2D.
Here is an example of the Texture2D before and after what I want to accomplish. http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/6749/redplanet512examplesmal.png
Also note that i drew a thin brown border around the crater hole. If this is possible it would be a great bonus.
After doing alot of googling on the subject it seems the best and fastest way to achieve the effect i want is to use pixel shaders.
More specifically a shader method called 'Alpha mapping'. Alpha mapping is done by using the original texture and another greyscale texture that defines what parts are visible or not.
The idea of the shader is to go through each pixel in the original texture and check how black each pixel in the greyscale image is at the same coordinate. The blacker the pixel in the greyscale picture is the higher the alpha value (more visible) the pixel in the original texture becomes. Since all this is done on the GPU it is lightning fast and leaves the CPU ready to do the actual logic for the game.
For my example I will create a black image to use as my greyscale image and then draw white circles on this corresponding to the parts i want to remove.
I've found a MSDN examples with working source code for XNA 4 that does this (the cat example):
http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/sprite_effects
EDIT: I got this to work quite nicely. Created a small tutorial with source code here: http://syntaxwarriors.com/2012/xna-alpha-mapping-with-pixel-shaders/
