Who is this book for?
This book is for everyone! Whatever your experience, you will find a recipe to suit your need and skill. Great care has been taken to ensure the easier recipes provide a great deal of detail so they can be followed by readers without a great deal of programming experience. Each chapter gradually builds in difficulty so you will be able to progress through it as your XNA coding improves and you want to move on to more sophisticated techniques.
A brief look at the table of contents
Chapter 1: Getting Started with XNA 2.0 (24 pages) Installing XNA 2.0 Game Studio and starting a new XNA 2.0 Project. Timing, GameComponents, GameServices and the StorageDevice.
Chapter 2: Setting Up Different Camera Modes in Your 3D World (120 pages) Setting up a first-person and a Quaternion camera. Smooth camera fly-bys, octree and quadtree culling, setting up a HLSL post-processing framework.
Chapter 3: Working with 2D Images/Textures in XNA 2.0 (102 pages) How to use the SpriteBatch to render 2D images. 2D-in-3D techniques such as billboarding, explosion particle systems and mirroring.
Chapter 4: Working with Models (108 pages) Loading, rendering and animating 3D Models. Combining World matrices, multiple kinds of collision detection. Defining your own TypeWriters and TypeReaders.
Chapter 5: Getting the Most Out of Vertices (144 pages) Rendering lines and triangles, storing them on the graphics card. Bilinear interpolation, pointer-to-terrain picking and bump mapping. 3D ocean and racing track generation.
Chapter 6: Adding Light to Your Scene in XNA 2.0 (60 pages) Lighting basics, shadowing and deferred rendering for multiple lights.
Chapter 7: Adding Sounds to Your XNA 2.0 Project (12 pages) Adding sounds to your XNA 2.0 game, both for 2D and 3D games.
Chapter 8: Networking in XNA 2.0 (28 pages) Adding networking to your XNA 2.0 game.
Development environment costs
The software you need to develop your own games in XNA 2.0 is completely free. You'll need both the Visual Studio Express C# edition and XNA 2.0 Game Studio, which you can download for free from Microsoft's website.
The only cost incurred will be if you want to upload your finished game to your XBox360 console, when an annual subscription is payable to Microsoft. If you're just targeting the PC development environment, you won't have to pay anything.
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