November 2008
Beginner
510 pages
16h 24m
English
Content preview from Learning XNA 3.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Summary
3D development uses a coordinate system with X-, Y-, and Z-axes. XNA uses a right-handed coordinate system.
Creating a game in 3D differs from 2D development in ways similar to how painting on a canvas differs from recording a video with a camcorder. In 3D development, you place objects at different points in the world and create a camera that you move around that world.
A camera defines a viewing frustum or field of view that determines which portions of a 3D world are visible on the screen. Anything that exists inside the viewing frustum is visible; if an object is not in the viewing frustum, it won't be visible on the screen.
XNA uses High Level Shader Language (HLSL) to draw objects in 3D. The
Effectclass is used to draw objects from XNA code and allows developers to modify parameters of the HLSL effect being used. TheBasicEffectclass derives fromEffectand allows you to draw objects without having to code the HLSL yourself.Nearly everything in XNA 3D is drawn using primitives. Triangles are one such primitive, and you draw them by specifying a series of vertices. The
VertexPositionColorandVertexPositionTextureobjects are two objects used to draw different types of primitives.When a triangle is drawn in 3D, the back side of it is not drawn. This is because, to improve performance, only the parts of an object that are facing the camera are drawn (this is called backface culling). Objects drawn in counter-clockwise fashion in XNA are culled by default.
Matrix multiplication ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.