\Managed DirectX and XNA Framework news
4/25/06: Book is here !!!
Written by Benjamin Nitschke who is responsible for the great looking XNA Racer starter kit as well as being one of the few people to ever get a managed game published.
The postman left a nice gift for me this morning, a copy of Ben's book. I've had a grand total of about 30 minutes to look at it so don't consider this a full review.... Firstly you can get the code for the book included versions of XNA Racer and XNA Shooter from the Wrox website. The XNA Racer and XNA Shooter sites are not up yet but Rocket Commander has been up for quite a while. I have no idea if the Racer game is identical to what was supposed to show up on the creators club site or a different version, but looks like the book version is available first.
Nice size book - 450 pages... Chapter 1 is a basic GSE intro, Chapter 2 starts with Pong just like all game books should! Chapter 3 Adds some helper classes and turns Pong into Breakout - nice slow progression. Chapter introduces game components and Tetris. So far everything is in 2d but chapters 5-3 take a rapid leap into 3d engine development including shaders, normal mapping and post processing effects. These chapters use Rocket Commander as the example. Chapters 9-11 introduce XACT, Input and UI techniques and produce the XNA Shooter game. Finally 12-14 use the game engine to produce XNA Racer including landscape and physics. WOW that's quite a ride - Pong to XNA Racer in 450 pages and 6 complete games. My guess is that the book deals with the important parts of each game and you are going to have to do a lot of self review of the code. If you are expecting a book that walks you through every line of code you would probably be better waiting for one of the other XNA books this one is after all called 'Professional'.
Thats it for now... watch for a full review in the next couple of days... and enjoy playing XNA Racer on that big HD TV. If you normally buy your books through amazon then I would love you to follow the link on this page - I don't ask for any payment for The ZBuffer but some Amazon referrals help me buy the occasional book or Xbox controller.
With a little bit of magic, a few diff tools and a couple of hours I have produced a list of all the API changes in the new refresh
Well it went live at 2am and The ZMan was too old to stay up and wait for it. Which of course means I'm the last to announce it. The Xbox part will update itself next time you launch the game launcher.
