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

Building the playfield


Now that we have a fancy new style of camera, we need something to actually point it at. For Tank Battles, we are going to use height maps to generate terrain for the playfield.

Height maps

What is a height map anyway? A height map is nothing more than a 2D image that we will use to represent the height of each vertex that makes up our terrain. To generate the height maps included in the resources file for this chapter, the Clouds effect of Paint.NET (available at no cost at http://www.getpaint.net) was used on empty images of 128x128 pixels. The size of the height map image will determine the number of nodes present in the terrain when we convert the height map into vertices:

The Clouds filter of programs like Paint.NET and Photoshop produce smoothly transitioning gradients with some degree of randomization applied to them. The previous image contains a few of these randomly generated images as an example. Their smooth transition between light and dark levels makes...