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Learning XNA 3.0
book

Learning XNA 3.0

by Aaron Reed
November 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
510 pages
16h 24m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning XNA 3.0

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 Effect class is used to draw objects from XNA code and allows developers to modify parameters of the HLSL effect being used. The BasicEffect class derives from Effect and 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 VertexPositionColor and VertexPositionTexture objects 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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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596154905Supplemental ContentErrata Page