August 2011
Intermediate to advanced
360 pages
9h 14m
English
Chapter 8
Graphics
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Defining basic 2D and 3D graphics terms
- Understanding when to use XNA
- Using the XNA game loop
- Drawing 2D and 3D graphics with XNA
Developers have greatly improved the user experience on mobile devices by leveraging high-performance graphics and animations. And not surprisingly, many best-selling mobile applications have also relied on great graphics. It’s important for developers to understand how to draw graphics in the Windows Phone 7 (WP7) platform.
Graphics is an area that even many seasoned software developers are unfamiliar with. That’s why this chapter begins with a basic glossary of graphics terms. However, if you’ve already created graphics on the iOS or Android platform, you can certainly skip the “Graphics Fundamentals” section. Next, you’ll learn how graphics are handled in WP7 at a conceptual level, and how techniques differ when working with the iOS and Android.
The most important concept you’ll learn in this chapter is how to work with the graphics API in the XNA (New generation Architecture) framework. XNA is a set of programming tools that’s built on top of the .NET framework and provides both powerful graphics and a formidable gaming engine. Unlike Silverlight, XNA is not an event-driven framework. Instead, it utilizes the game loop concept. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to draw 2D or 3D graphics using XNA and how to implement animations and enable special effects in WP7.
RUNNING XNA GRAPHICS ON WP7 EMULATOR
