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Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creators Guidex$20.65
  (8 reviews)
Best Price: $39.99 $20.65
Bring your gaming visions to life with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express Create complete 3D games using Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express and this hands-on guide. Written by experienced game developers, Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creator's Guide details the fundamentals of great game programming and offers detailed examples. Inside, you'll learn to program a game engine, write shader code, create and animate 3D models, and add fluid motion and special effects. You'll also find out how to launch ballistics, add realistic scenery and terrain, and integrate lighting and textures. Step-by-step tutorials on underlying C# code and explanations of vector and matrix techniques are included. Build and dynamically update XNA game windows and custom 3D objects Learn scintillating animation techniques Create lifelike skyboxes, textures, lighting, and shading effects Program shaders using high-level shader language Develop single- and multi-player games Generate and code terrain with height detection Construct impressive graphics using sprites, multi-texturing, and blending Integrate audio, game dashboards, and score tracking Develop realistic collision detection, ballistics, and particle effects HaHHhhndle keyboard, mouse, and game controller input Create static *.fbx and animated Quake 2 models and control them in code
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Customer Reviews
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Good Introduction to Game Programming with XNA
By A2LHZLX1VCJFXT on 2007-07-17
I was excited to see this book arrive from Amazon so quickly and couldn't wait to look at the newest XNA game programming book. Although, I was somewhat disappointed when I first opened the box from Amazon and did a quick look through pages. Realizing this book was far more basic than what the description on Amazon lead me to believe. However, as I read through the book and ran the example downloaded code I realized this really was a good introduction to game programming.
Pros
* Provides a good introduction to many fundamental game programming concepts
* Doesn't jump right into 3D mathematics as many intro game programming books do, I feel this gives the reader a better grasp for how to apply 3D math later in the book
* Good examples of the 3D math concepts provided in example code, not many programming books do this
* Chapters are short, easy to read and understand
* Covers some of the more basic tools a beginning game programmer will use
* Provides a lot of example code that compiles and runs without troubles
* Book does cover some more advanced concepts that will certainly be useful to any level of user
Cons
* Wish the example code was highlighted a little better in the books text
* Example code uses some dated conventions (Hungarian notation) which somewhat date the code
* Would have liked to see some more detailed examples and a game or two that brought the concepts together
* Some of the chapters are a little too short for my liking considering some of the concepts this book covers
If you are looking for a good introduction to game programming with XNA I would recommend this book. Those with some game programming experience looking for an introduction to XNA may be a little disappointed but overall I feel this is a good title for any novice.
So Far So Good (UPDATED!!!)
By A1A47RO2VNF320 on 2007-11-12
I dont know what other people are saying about this guide, but i can tell you, from my personal experience, that this is a GREAT book.
When you first get the book, the opening chapter was confusing to figure out, after 2 hours of monkeying around i got it. After that, everything else went smooth. And i am learning really cool things. The end of the chapter exercises are fun, not to challenging, but enough to make you learn.
How to Hate this Book: Know about XNA when you buy it, and also have a good grasp on particle systems, controls, cameras, vectors, matrices, primitives, adding models, animation, hit detection.
How to Love this book: Dont know anything about XNA, But have some knowledge of what a vertex is. Or what a Color is, Drr?, and most of all.... Dont just expect to know how to be a bomb programmer just by reading this book. Books are just instruments to give you insight into a complex machine. Most of the learning should be done by experimentation.
Example: Page 73: "Spend the time you need to ensure that you understand transformations. It is not an overly complex topic, but it can be challenging for beginner graphics programmers who do not give transformations the learning time the topic deserves."
So if you keep a self learning mentality, you should find this book VERY VERY VERY VERY HELPFUL, I would recommend it to any who does not know a thing about programming 3D, but has a pretty decent knowledge of physics, math(calculus), and 2D programming skills. This is what is going to boost me to the top. ;)
-------------------------------Update-----------------------------------
So its been a while, and i am just finishing up Chapter 17 "Ballistics." This is still an excellent book. I only have one beef with the book, and that is, it has awesome explanations of matrices and such, but when doing the camera tutorial, the auther assumes you have fully mastered matrices, and understand all. With that said, it still deserves the rating it received. This is a beginners book, and should be treated as one.
My advice would be to buy this book if you do not understand anything about 3D programming. This could be the start that helps you become a Game programmer, rather than just a hobbyist. (as in someone who can make a cube move around the screen).
Introduction to XNA concepts and bad programming practices
By A11OVP84RTZLUW on 2007-12-20
I'm an experienced programmer, and a professional game developer, so I'm not exactly the audience that the authors were shooting for. (They claim to be shooting for "beginning to intermediate" programmers in the introduction.)
This book does serve to describe some of the concepts in XNA that I was unfamiliar with, but I found the text written poorly and the code written unprofessionally.
Even for a beginning audience, there were factual errors in the text that are at best misleading, and certainly contribute to a misunderstanding of the processes involved. For example, when discussing pixel shaders, the authors claim that the output gets sent to the graphics card one pixel at a time. This is false, as the pixel shader is running on the graphics card already, except in the exceptionally rare (and ill-documented) case of running with a reference rasterizer on the CPU.
The organization is questionable, with topics used before they're explained (chapters 13, 14, and 15 are on vectors, matrices, and cameras, which are important foundations for chapters both before and after). Within chapters, code is presented in a half-tutorial fashion, but without enough guidance to really follow along.
The diagrams are typically not helpful, including screenshots that don't do a good job of illustrating the concepts at hand. A case in point, Figure 20-1 tries to show "before and after directional lighting". Any still image is going to be hard pressed to accomplish this. More useful would be a reference to an interactive demo.
The book has a zip file that can be downloaded from the publisher's website, which is of some use, but it doesn't seem to agree with some of the references in the book, including discussion of how to use the authors' framework, which is a starting point for much of the code in the book.
This was written before the release of Game Studio 2.0, so some of the book is already out of date, including comments that there is no networking support, and a strange admonition that writing networked games "might be potentially unsafe".
Abysmal Code Reference
By A2C8YMLISZRMU0 on 2007-12-14
Given other people's positive reviews of this book, I'll make the concession that I didn't use this book by reading it chapter by chapter. I used it as a reference and a guide.
And for that, this book is horrible. When I couldn't figure out a concept easily, I'd look to the book for an explanation and some sample code. For explanations, the book was mediocre. Not bad, just not written in any good teaching style.
As sample code, the book fails on every single level. The code is incomprehensible, with odd naming conventions, astounding overuse of variables, and massive over-complication of basic XNA tasks. (If you went to this book first to learn XNA, then please take a look at other resources and see how much simpler your code could be).
Most of all, though, the code is completely un-portable. It takes tremendous amounts of blood, sweat, and tears to port any of their code to a different program, to a more general use, or to a more object-oriented system. It's almost as though they tried to make their code work exclusively for their very specific examples, with absolutely no thought to making the code useful in any other context.
If you're looking for a casual reference to help you along while learning XNA, avoid this book at all costs. It will provide you nothing but pain. If you want to learn the concepts carefully and freshly for the first time, by reading a textbook, then this book will probably suffice. But I must reiterate, the code examples provided in this book are AWFUL. Every single thing you do in XNA is easier than they made it.
Examples of horrible code:
-In the particle effect sample, the code that made the particles appear at the correct position was in the particles' draw method. They made a constructor able to specify their origin, but instead of being intelligent, they set that to Zero and translated the image in the Draw method.
-Also, the particles only moved in 2 dimensions, when it was a single line of code to make it 3, a line of code that was already written.
-The core of most of the examples is a small grass field you can walk around on. The controls must have been made by someone with absolutely zero experience placing PC games. It's difficult to trust any so-called game programmer that isn't aware of the WASD + mouse standard (they used arrow keys and INVERTED mouse look). That issue was relatively easy to fix, however.
-Also, instead of placing the ground at Y 0, which would have made expanding on that world much easier, your camera is at 0, and the ground is -.8 or something.
-There is a method in their code that returns its parameter. It does nothing else. Call it with a parameter, and get the exact same reference back, unmodified. Why that method exists, I can't fathom.
But the worst, by far, was the general stuff. The naming conventions, and the layout of their code (or lack thereof) were all inexcusably horrific.
excellent intro to 3D programming - easy to understand
By A27BM5AR5C34HJ on 2008-01-22
This is an excellent step-by-step approach with many short chapters that are easy to read. The examples are complete and I can plug the code into my own projects with hardly any effort. I recommend this book for any beginner or for any experienced programmer who doesn't know how to program games. I've been programming for three years but I don't want to work hard when I'm learning...this book delivers.
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