Learning XNA 4.0

Chapter 1. What’s New in XNA 4.0?

In this chapter, I review major changes that have been made in XNA 4.0. If you’re familiar with XNA 3.x or other versions, this is a great place to get started in this book. If you’re new to XNA, you should probably skip ahead to the next chapter. You won’t be missing out on anything, as all of the information covered in this chapter will be covered throughout the rest of the book.

Revised Project Folder Structure

The first thing you might notice when creating a game project in XNA 4.0 is that the structure of the solution has changed. In previous versions of XNA, the content pipeline picked up game content from a subfolder named Content, which was located within the game project you created, as seen in Solution Explorer (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Sample XNA 3.x Solution

In XNA 4.0, the Content folder has been moved to a new project within your solution. The content project will be listed under the name GameProjectNameContent (with the name of your project replacing “GameProjectName”) and will be followed with the word “Content” in parentheses (see Figure 1-2).

Figure 1-2. Sample XNA 4.0 Solution

You’ll add all your game content (audio, textures, models, etc.) to the content project in the same way you added them to the content folder in XNA 3.x. You will ...