Product Description

You haven′t experienced the full potential of Xbox 360 or Windows until you′ve created your own homebrewed games for these innovative systems. With Microsoft′s new XNA Framework, the only thing limiting you is your imagination. Now professional game developer and Microsoft DirectX MVP Benjamin Nitschke shows you how to take advantage of the XNA Game Studio Express tools and libraries in order to build cutting–edge games.

Whether you want to explore new worlds or speed down a city block in a souped up dragster, this book will get you up and running quickly. You′ll learn how to implement 3D models, generate huge landscapes, map cool–looking shaders to your 3D objects, and much more. Nitschke also steps you through the development of your first fully functional racing game. You′ll then be able to apply this information as you write your own XNA cross–platform games.

What you will learn from this book

• Tricks for managing the game engine and user interface
• How to program an old school shooter game and space adventure
• Tips for improving racing game logic and expanding your game ideas
• Methods for integrating amazing visual effects using advanced shader techniques
• Steps for adding sound and music with XACT–bringing your game to life
• How to fine–tune and debug your game for optimal performance

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to write their own games for the Xbox 360 or Windows platforms. You should have some experience coding with C# or a similar .NET language.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190153 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 504 pages

From the Back Cover

Professional XNA Game Programming For Xbox 360 and Windows®

You haven′t experienced the full potential of Xbox 360 or Windows® until you′ve created your own homebrewed games for these innovative systems. With Microsoft′s new XNA Framework, the only thing limiting you is your imagination. Now professional game developer and Microsoft DirectX MVP Benjamin Nitschke shows you how to take advantage of the XNA Game Studio Express tools and libraries in order to build cutting–edge games.

Whether you want to explore new worlds or speed down a city block in a souped up dragster, this book will get you up and running quickly. You′ll learn how to implement 3D models, generate huge landscapes, map cool–looking shaders to your 3D objects, and much more. Nitschke also steps you through the development of your first fully functional racing game. You′ll then be able to apply this information as you write your own XNA cross–platform games.

What you will learn from this book

• Tricks for managing the game engine and user interface

• How to program an old school shooter game and space adventure

• Tips for improving racing game logic and expanding your game ideas

• Methods for integrating amazing visual effects using advanced shader techniques

• Steps for adding sound and music with XACT—bringing your game to life

• How to fine–tune and debug your game for optimal performance

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to write their own games for the Xbox 360 or Windows platforms. You should have some experience coding with C# or a similar .NET language.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author
Benjamin Nitschke ( Hannover, Germany) is a professional game developer at exDream entertainment, creators of "Arena Wars", and Armies of Steel.  Benny is well known as the creator of the first .NET 2.0 Game Rocket Commander which is the featured gaming project on Microsoft’s Coding4Fun website and includes 10 video tutorials for aspiring game programmers. Benjamin is a Microsoft DirectX Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and writes a popular blog about game development located at http://abi.exDream.com.

Customer Reviews

A solid book for developing games under XNA
"Professional XNA Game Programming" is a decent introduction to developing games under C# and XNA. A word of warning: it's not appropriate for complete beginners. A certain level of competence in C# and programming in general is assumed (if you don't know what delegates and generics are, for example, read a C# primer first).

For those of us who already know how to program, maybe even have written some games, but want to know how to write games in C# and XNA, this is an excellent introduction. The examples are clear and well explained, and each chapter or part leads to the creation of a complete yet extensible game. Very little is pure theory in isolation, almost everything is concerned with the practicalities of XNA. I learned a lot reading through it and working through the code.

Minor negatives:
- the author is a bit too keen to evangelise test driven design. Alright, we get it, unit tests are good!
- bits of the book are out of date already since the 1.0 Refresh release. (In fairness, the author's website and forum are well supported which should alleviate this).
- the chapter on XACT is slightly on the brief side and evidently affected by the fact the author clearly doesn't like it.
- a few areas of the book are slightly hard to read - English is clearly not the author's first language. However this is a very minor quibble and the rest of the time, the author's informal style is entertaining while remaining clear.

In summary, I would recommend this to anyone who already knows C# and wants to make games in XNA. Working through this book is probably the first thing you should do after installing XNA GSE... you may move on from it after that but it will give you a very thorough grounding in the basic techniques, and enough hints to know where to go with the advanced stuff.

Hard to read - keep Google and Wikipedia handy
It's obvious that the author knows what he's doing. The games that he's produced and are described in this book are amazing. There was a real buzz around XNA Racer on the community forums at the start of the year.

However, I buy a book to read offline with occasional keyboard time and as such, I find this book difficult to recommend. There is too little exposition around the key concepts and the book lurches from over-explaining the basics to assuming black belt matrix algebra knowledge.

A few examples:
* This book is about 3D games programming but has way too few explanatory diagrams.
* The author mentions point sprites as an alternative to billboards. OK, so what's a point sprite? What are the pros and cons of point sprites vs billboards? This is a minor example but a good editor would surely have demanded an explanatory paragraph or two.
* Did the author think the book would be published in colour? The text often refers to coloured elements in black and white diagrams.
* The sample code contains too much of the author's own engine library code, making it difficult to incorporate into your own efforts.
* If it's a bad idea (and it is) to use foreach in game loops, NEVER use foreach in code samples.

Probably the most frustrating thing about the book is the prose style that is at times unreadable and occasionally nonsensical. The book also has an extraordinarily high number of mistakes in the text - I'm guessing this was rushed to market to beat the inevitable XNA book rush.

A very talented developer let down by his publisher (and apparent lack of proofreading effort). When does Petzold's XNA book come out?!

Not as helpful as I'd hoped - intermediate user
First off, I am not an accomplished C# programmer - I've only been learning for a while (say, an intermediate user), and perhaps that is one of the reasons I didn't get on so well with this book. So please, bear this in mind - I was not the target audience and your mileage may vary.

The unit-test aspect really caught me off guard and left me feeling cheated. If you plan on buying this book, DO be aware that the author uses almost every opportunity to sing the praises of this particular methodology and don't let it be a surprise to you.

The early simple example code quickly gives way to empty unit-test listings that the reader is assumed to fill in for themselves. There were sections that were longer than they ought to be for the sake of clarity, and ended up more confusing than they should have been. There were several typos, but no doubt these will be put in an errata soon.

All in all, this will not be a book that I return to nor will I recommend it to my workmates. I am, however, very relieved to know that others have found it useful (from other reviews).