Textured Quad Problems?

[Robin Sarac]

I've been following the tutorials on The Hazy Mind (time for another donation methinks) and adapting the code slightly for my game engine.  I'm trying to develop casual games for those less coordinated souls (like myself) that can't keep up with the young gamers.

The best thing a bout this site is the ideas I get from it as far as how things are structured, even more so than the [great] code.

I'm having a problem drawing a textured quad using shaders.  I've stepped through the code many times and looked for errors, but I still see nothing on the screen.  In the code that loads the textured quad, if I set the vertices so that the quad is about 20 units across (from 0.5f left and right of the origin to something like 10.0f) I do see a very pixelated tiny portion of my texture that fills the window.  Moving the camera backwards doesn't seem to help as there doesn't seem to be any movement (although variables confirm that my camera is moving).  Even before I added a camera, I had this same problem.

I didn't post code on purpose because I don't want to suggest that anybody bother debugging my code.   But if anybody has had a similar problem and figured it out, I would appreciate a push in the right direction.

[EclipsE]

I had the same problem. I made a quad, gave it a texture but still i don't see anything. And what did I do?? First, in your shader, where your technique is do this:

technique TransformTexture {
    pass P0 {
         CullMode = none;
         .......
    }
}

the ........ means other code that is there

If you see the quad now that means he is rotated 180 degrees and is pointing in the direction you are looking. And that is why you can't see it... Maybe 

[Robin Sarac]

I tried that, but no luck!

But thanks for the reply. I'll keep at it and post when I figure the problem out.

[Robin Sarac]

So I stepped through all of my code and discovered a problem.  I was setting my WorldViewProjection matrix for my shader (Parameter.SetValue()) to my object's world matrix only.  After setting it to the proper World * CameraView * CameraProjection matrix, I can now see models (after way too much brutal debugging) even if mny textured quads still don't display.  It's progress!

Is there a way to debug shader code?  Or is it just a matter of dilligence?  How would you have found a problem like this?