Professional XNA™ Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360™ and Windows® with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Second Edition

Chapter 12. Generating Landscapes and Tracks

To create the last big game for this book, the XNA Racing Game, we are going to explore some of the more advanced topics of game programming in the next chapters, like 3D landscape generation, physics, more complex controls and shadow mapping algorithms.

This chapter covers the whole landscape generation and render techniques as well as the track data for the roads in all levels. The next chapter takes a closer look at the physics engine required for the racing game. In the final chapter you learn all about the game screens, game logic, and fine-tuning of the racing game, and you get some final tips about game development. The game that is covered in this book is a complete racing game, but it shows you only one track and a simplified game principle. The complete XNA Racing Game is available as a starter kit for the XNA Framework by Microsoft at http://Creators.xna.com. The complete game covers more missions, more cool features, several cars, more cool-looking 3D objects, which you can download and watch to learn more. We are going to cover all the basics to allow you to create a cool game like the Racing Game, but I want to cover more than just one game with the game engine we have written so far. It is not only possible to create game modifications of the Racing Game, but as we saw in the previous chapters it is helpful to have developed a full game with the game engine before starting with the next game.

Before you go ahead and design ...