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

Adding texture – a gentle introduction to HLSL


We have already specified the texture we want to use for the terrain in the LoadContent() event, so now we just need to adjust our code to take the texture into account. Since we are not using a BasicEffect for rendering, we will need to expand the code in the Terrain.fx file in order to utilize the texture we pass to the Terrain class.

While a full discussion of the intricacies of High Level Shader Language (HLSL) is well beyond the scope of this book – entire books can and have been written about writing shaders – we can certainly cover enough of the basics to allow us to generate all of the effects we will need for Tank Battles.

Originally developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA for Direct3D, HLSL is a programming language designed for the creation of shaders. We can work with both vertex shaders, which convert the vertex information for our triangles into pixels to be rendered to the display, and pixel shaders, which describe the characteristics...