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 cube


With our maze in place, we can now turn our attention to creating the cube that the player will be chasing in Cube Chaser. We will continue to use triangles built by hand to represent our cube, but this time instead of giving the triangles solid colors, we will see how to map a texture image onto the faces of the cube.

A texture is a two-dimensional bitmap image that is projected onto a 3D object in order to give the object the desired appearance. By using a texture instead of a vertex color, we can give the cube surface details. In the case of our cube, we will use a circuit board image, but we could just as easily apply a photograph or any other type of image as the cube's texture.

In order to create the cube, we will add the texture to our game's content project and build the cube's vertices.