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 Projection matrix


On a physical camera, you might have a selection of various lenses with different properties – a wide angled lens for wide shots, or a telephoto lens for zooming in close. The Projection matrix is the way we describe such properties to the XNA rendering system. The Projection matrix describes to the graphics card how to translate (or project) 3D objects onto the 2D viewing area of the screen. The following image illustrates the parameters used to construct the Projection matrix:

The Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView() method accepts four parameters that define how our virtual camera will view the 3D scene. The first is the field of view, or viewing angle, that the camera covers. The larger this value is, the wider the angle the camera will display. In this case, we specify MathHelper.PiOver4, which translates to a 45 degree angle.

Note

Angles in XNA

XNA handles all angles in radians. In a full circle there are 2*pi radians. Half of a circle is 180 degree, or pi radians...