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

The Game1 constructor


The Game1 class has a simple constructor with no parameters. An instance of this class will be created by the shell contained in the Program.cs file within the project when the game is launched.

Note

The Program.cs file

When your XNA game starts, the Main() method in the Program.cs file is what actually gets executed. This method creates an instance of your Game1 class and calls the Run() method, which performs the initialization we will discuss shortly. It then begins executing the game loop, updating and drawing your game repeatedly until the program exits. In many games, we will not have to worry about Program.cs, but there are some instances (combining XNA and Windows Forms, for example) when it is necessary to make changes here.

By default, the constructor has created an instance of the GraphicsDeviceManager class to store in the graphics member, and has established the base directory for the Content object, which is an instance of the ContentManager class.

When we build our project, all of the items in the content project are translated into a format specific to XNA, with the .xnb file extension. These are then copied to the Content folder in the same directory as our game's executable file.

Our Speller game will not need to make any changes to the class constructor, so we will simply move on to the next method that is called when our game starts.