Book Image

XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By : Kurt Jaegers
Book Image

XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide

By: Kurt Jaegers

Overview of this book

Move beyond the world of flat 2D-based game development and discover how to create your own exciting 3D games with Microsoft XNA 4.0. Create a 3D maze, fire shells at enemy tanks, and drive a rover on the surface of Mars while being attacked by alien saucers."XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide" takes you step-by-step through the creation of three different 3D video games with Microsoft XNA 4.0. Learn by doing as you explore the worlds of 3D graphics and game design.This book takes a step-by-step approach to building 3D games with Microsoft XNA, describing each section of code in depth and explaining the topics and concepts covered in detail. From the basics of a 3D camera system to an introduction to writing DirectX shader code, the games in this book cover a wide variety of both 3D graphics and game design topics. Generate random mazes, load and animate 3D models, create particle-based explosions, and combine 2D and 3D techniques to build a user interface."XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example: Beginner's Guide" will give you the knowledge to bring your own 3D game creations to life.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
XNA 4 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action – the pixel shader


  1. 1. Examine the code of the PixelShaderFunction, in particular the line that reads return float4(1, 0, 0, 1).

  2. 2. Modify the code for the PixelShaderFunction, replacing the contents with the following:

    float4 PixelShaderFunction(VertexShaderOutput input) : COLOR0
    {
    return tex2D(textureSampler, input.TextureCoordinate);
    }

What just happened?

In step 1, we see that the default pixel shader function is quite simple. All it does is return a float4 value of (1, 0, 0, 1). But what does this mean? Note the COLOR0 at the end of the declaration for the pixel shader function. This is another semantic that indicates that this function returns the color of the pixel that will be sent to the display.

If we interpret the float4 value as a color, in the order Red, Green, Blue, Alpha, we see that the default pixel shader simply returns a non-transparent red. Ah ha! This is why our terrain is currently rendering as a large red blob!

Our replacement function uses the tex2D HLSL...