Depth Buffer not working in XNA?

Question

I'm stumped. I have been fighting this for about 2 hours now.

Here are the interesting parts of my code:

protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
    // Allows the game to exit
    if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed)
        this.Exit();

    var time = gameTime.TotalGameTime.TotalSeconds;
    this.position = new Vector3(
        2.0f * (float)Math.Sin(time),
        2.0f * (float)Math.Cos(time),
        2.0f * (float)Math.Cos(time / 4));

    effect.World = Matrix.Identity;
    effect.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(this.position, Vector3.Zero, Up);
    effect.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(1.5708f, (float)this.Window.ClientBounds.Width / this.Window.ClientBounds.Height, float.Epsilon, 500.0f);

    base.Update(gameTime);
}

protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)
{
    var count = this.SetUpVertices() / 3;

    this.GraphicsDevice.Clear(ClearOptions.DepthBuffer | ClearOptions.Target, Color.CornflowerBlue, 1.0f, 0);

    this.GraphicsDevice.DepthStencilState = DepthStencilState.Default;
    this.GraphicsDevice.BlendState = BlendState.Opaque;
    this.GraphicsDevice.RasterizerState = RasterizerState.CullCounterClockwise;

    foreach (var pass in this.effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes)
    {
        pass.Apply();
        this.GraphicsDevice.DrawUserPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList, vertices, 0, count, VertexPositionTexture.VertexDeclaration);
    }

    base.Draw(gameTime);
}

Answer 1

You should always make the near plane value as far as you can. I use 0.1f personally because nothing much gets close to my camera but the further from zero the better.

Here's why.

Same with the far; in general make it as near as you can.

As the article states, don't try to "cover all ground" by going from 0.00000001 to 1000000000. Instead try to analyze your needs and split your scene into "near", "middle", and "far" (or whatever) with different matrices to correspond.

Answer 2

Consarnit!

sigh... I fixed it.

Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(
    1.5708f,
    (float)this.Window.ClientBounds.Width / this.Window.ClientBounds.Height,
    float.Epsilon,  // <-- HERE IS THE PROBLEM! RIGHT HERE!!!1one!1
    500.0f);

Apparently, you cannot use float.Epsilon as the near plane, for some reason...

Commenters: What would be a sane value then?

Answer 3

I can't comment yet, but from my experience, 0 or 0.01f both work just fine for the near clipping plane.