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 – creating content assets


To create content assets, perform the following steps:

  1. 1. Open Microsoft Paint, or your favorite image creation program, and create a new 16 x 16 image. Fill the image with white color and save the file to a temporary location as SQUARE.BMP.

  2. 2. Switch back to Visual Studio and right-click on the SpellerContent (Content) project in Solution Explorer.

  3. 3. Select Add | Existing Item... from the pop-up menu and browse to the SQUARE.BMP file. Select it and click on Add to add it to the content project.

  4. 4. Again, right-click on the content project in Solution Explorer and this time select Add | New Item....

  5. 5. In the Add New Item window, select Sprite Font from the window's center pane.

  6. 6. Enter Segoe14.spritefont as the name of the file and click on Add.

  7. 7. Close the XML document that appears after Sprite Font has been added to the project.

What just happened?

We have now added both an image and a font to our content project. We will see how we load these assets into the game at runtime and how we can use them during gameplay.

Note

Alternatives when adding content

You can also drag-and-drop files directly from Windows Explorer into the Solution Manager pane in Visual Studio to add them to your content project. If you have the full version of Visual Studio, you can add a new bitmap object by selecting Add | New Item... from the project's pop-up menu and selecting Bitmap as the type. The free version of Visual Studio does not support creating bitmaps from within Visual Studio.

The SpriteFont file that we created in step 6 and the XML document mentioned in step 7 actually load an XML template that describes how the content pipeline should create the resulting .xnb file. In this case, the default values for the SpriteFont template are sufficient for our game. This resulted in the Segoe UI Mono font (added to your system when the Windows Phone SDK is installed), with a value of 14 points being used. As we will only be using the standard A to Z character set, we do not need to make any changes to this template for Speller.