New XNA 3D tutorial

riemerg

Hi all --

I have ported the first series of my MDX tutorial site to XNA beta2 code. You can find the first entry of the tut at this location:

http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series1/Starting_a_project.php

It's an introduction to 3D game programming using XNA. During the coming weeks I will be porting the code of the other 2 series, of which you can find screenshots at the homepage:

http://www.riemers.net/index.php expandall=1

As soon as XNA is released completely, the whole site will be built around it.

Comments are welcome

riemer

BlackDuck

Mate,

My hat off to you for providing this site. Just quickly browsing through and seeing the topics you cover I am quite impress. I am a newbie and the way you approach each section is exactly what I have been looking for and can not find any book that helps so far. Good luck and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the sections coverted over to XNA.

Quack

DJBurkey

Hi there,

Just wanted to say thanks for these tutorials, so far the first is very well laid out. I am a newbie to 3D and XNA, and I'm doing a final year university project researching XNA's 3D development and developing a small 3D game/demo. I will be watching this site in the coming weeks, look forward to the rest of the tutorials :)

James

ProfEclipse

One issue I noticed in the turorial is that it saves a reference to the GraphicsDevice object. This is a bad idea since the device may have to get recreated, rendering the saved reference invalid. It would be much better to save the GraphicsDeviceManager object instead and use graphicsManager.Graphics whenever you need the GraphicsDevice.

riemerg

DJBurkey:

Good luck with your univ project; that's exactly how and when I started my DirectX programming!!

ProfEclipse:

Excellent comment, hadn't thought about that one. It's easy to fix in my pages, but a question: with device recreation, do you mean the handling of lost devices (don't even know if this still has to be done in XNA) Because then I think I might also get away by putting a reference to the new graphicsManager.Graphics object in my device variable, after device recreation.

ProfEclipse

Right. Certain changes to the device parameters might require the device to be recreated rather than just reset when toggling windowed/fullscreen. In that case, the graphics device reference would become invalid and graphicsManager.Graphics would get a new instance. If you hang on to the graphics manager rather than the device, you get the device update for free.

Also, when the device is recreated, you need to recreate your SpriteBatch object, so that should be done in the LoadGraphicsContent method whenever loadAllContent is true.

wingnut1

Hey your tutorials are excellent. Its just the kind of thing I am looking for. Look forward to reading them as they appear.

Bapa

Yeh, I'm kind of a stranger to 3-D myself.

Looks like most of you are taking courses for game programming and stuff like that. I'm just some silly 16 (just turned 16 Nov. 7th) year old boy with nothing but a few books and online resources >:[

GreenLantern4

Thanks for the tutorial. This will come in handy.

Battlekiller

*clap* *clap*, awesome tutorials. I tried some of those tutorials once last summer in C++. I will now do do them in C#!!

riemerg

Going from Beta1 to Beta2 caused a lot of trouble, and I'm quite pleased that (most of the ) Beta2 code is compatible with XNA final! Great.

I have compiled the chapters of my first series on XNA 3D tuts, and they all are compatible with XNA final.

I have made some minor modifications to my effect file, so now my first 2 series are shader v1.1 compatible. This means that every owner of a graphics card graphics card bought since 2002 should be able to finish both series.

The code of the second series has already been ported to XNA, you can expect the complete series to be online in 2 days.

Here's the URL to the first chapter of the first series:

http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series1/Starting_a_project.php

Terry A. King

Excellent work. Can't wait to see the other tutorials you've got converted to XNA