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Also, it would seem that D3DMATRIX (from the upper case styling) is unmanaged. Code examples are incomplete, undeclared, and mispelled.Everything was fine until chapter 3, when they actually got to the code samples.Examples of which are fabricating a "gfx" variable and not telling you that they've renamed the default graphics variable. The editors and writers of this book have missed a HUGE problem in this book. I did not see anywhere where I had to add a dll reference for DirectX.mMatWorld is used through the entire book, from what I can tell.The offerings of this book are also misleading. Also, assigning to a "mMatWorld" variable that was never defined. From looking online, commonly this variable is used with D3DMATRIX, but they've NOT imported DirectX in the code. They claim they'll teach you all the math and everything you need. Everything in this book is overcomplicated.
I've looked at all the XNA books available as of May 2008, and honestly not a single one of them has been able to meet my hopes and expectations in terms of clearly explaining what's going on at a fundamental level in order to give one a solid basis to build on.Either they spend half the book explaining C# programming (which I think is a waste of time as there are many great C# programming books and it helps to learn the language independently first), or they launch straight into 2D or 3D details without spending time to explain the fundamental organization and operation of a modern game program.This particular book does better than average. There's a wonderful diagram in the first few pages that illustrates the update, draw, repeat cycle. For that and some other better than average introductory material I give the book 4 stars to distinguish it from the other rubbish out there.I haven't used it enough to comment on the code quality, but browsing through the chapters the topics look much more interesting (and relatively advanced) when compared to the other books available.So for someone with a background in programming, who would rather learn C# from another source (C# 3.0 in a Nutshell from O'Reilly is excellent), then this is at least one of the better "hint books" available.For the most part though, none of these books does a good job of helping the beginner. I'm still looking for one that has at least a paragraph that explains that for each frame your program is responsible for drawing everything on the screen from scratch each time rather than having the video card somehow do it automatically, and then show how it works conceptually and in the context of a modern accelerated 3D video card.Microsoft's XNA is one of the more impressive things they've ever produced, and it makes (serious) game programming about 100x more accessible than it ever has been before, but the current state of information for the beginner is rather poor and it makes getting started, in what is admittedly an amazingly complex enterprise, a lot harder than I think it needs to be.
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.
I think that this book is a perfect introduction to the new Microsoft Platform. To Develop a game is not a simple task but this book cover all the important feature needed to build a modern 3D game in an easy way. This book is ideal for beginner game programmer. The only prerequisites is the knowledge of the C# programming language and basic concept of Microsoft.NET Framework.
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. (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. I'm an experienced programmer, and a professional game developer, so I'm not exactly the audience that the authors were shooting for. A case in point, Figure 20-1 tries to show "before and after directional lighting". 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). 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".
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