Book Image

Microsoft XNA 4.0 Game Development Cookbook

By : Luke Drumm
Book Image

Microsoft XNA 4.0 Game Development Cookbook

By: Luke Drumm

Overview of this book

Microsoft XNA attempts to free game developers from writing "repetitive boilerplate code", allowing them to focus on producing enjoyable gameplay rather than tedious and complicated setup. The Framework has reduced the once steep learning curve for game development, transforming it into something more attainable, and this cookbook will help you to take full advantage of XNA to bring reality into your virtual worlds. "Microsoft XNA 4.0 Game Development Cookbook" is the perfect resource for propelling your game development capabilities from the simple 2D demo towards engaging and exciting, professional looking games. With a diverse selection of game-related topics covered, discover how to create rich 2D and 3D worlds filled with interesting characters, detailed scenery and dynamic special effects applicable to PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 game play. There is no shortage of introductory texts available for XNA, a number of which are fantastic for getting started with simple 2D games, but "Microsoft XNA 4.0 Game Development Cookbook"ù will help you take the steps to start producing games that have deeper gameplay, compelling graphics and that little bit of extra polish! The book's recipes will get you up and going quickly with the next level of game features such as 3D graphics, AI, and network play. With this practical cookbook to hand, even the more experienced developer will be better equipped to achieve high level tasks with XNA in a quick and efficient manner.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft XNA 4.0 Game Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Displaying hexagonal maps


Hexagons have formed the basis of a number of strategic board games over the last three decades, both physical and virtual, and thus the ability to deal with them in one's own games can be advantageous.

In reality, drawing a hexagonal map usually doesn't present the greatest challenge. On the other hand, it's not unusual for a lot of hexagonal-based computer games to rely upon either mouse or touch input as the selection mechanism for hexagons and the challenge of how to correlate a mouse click with a particular hexagon can be a surprisingly unintuitive problem to solve.

With this in mind, we will be covering not only the drawing of the hexagons onto the screen, but also the thorny issue of how to map screen coordinates into their corresponding hexagon as the following image illustrates:

Getting ready

In order to draw a hexagonal map, we're going to need an image of a hexagon.

The code demonstrated here was written with an image of 100x87 pixels in mind, but it can...