These ZIP archives contain source code from the book, XNA Game Studio Express: Developing Games for Windows and the Xbox 360, by Joseph Hall. The following paragraphs describe the changes that have been made from the XNA 3.x version of the same code.
The Files
The update projects are compressed into ZIP files. They’re separated based on the section of the book in which the example was developed, with one exception — chapter 10′s project is a monster beacuse of the WAV source files. That project has its own ZIP file.
- Part 1 – Introduction [without CH10 - Audio].zip [2.04 MB]
- Part 1 – Introduction [CH10 - Audio].zip [46.80 MB]
- Part 2 – Genre Studies.zip [1.77 MB]
- Part 3 – Components.zip [0.39 MB]
- Part 4 – Tasty Bits.zip [coming soon]
Intuitive File Names
I used longer, more descriptive filenames for the solution files, project files, and directory names. The new names make it much easier to locate the source code for a specific chapter. This may cause issues if you do your development in a deeply-nested subdirectory, like the default Visual Studio project folder of “C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\”.
I suggest creating a folder off the root of the drive from which you wish to develop your XNA games. I use “C:\projects\” on my laptop, and “E:\projects\” on my desktop.
Reach versus HiDef
There are two “Game Profile” options for your projects — Reach and HiDef. If you get an error along the lines of “No suitable graphics card was found”, you probably need to change your projects Game Profile to Reach. You’ll find this setting in the project properties, under the XNA Game Studio tab.
When converting the book’s examples to XNA 4.0, I’ve been setting the projects to the Reach profile. I’m working on a virtual machine, and it doesn’t support HiDef. Read about the differences for yourself, and see which is right for your game. In my case, I’d prefer that my examples work on as many hardware types as possible (Reach).
SpriteBatch.Begin
There were some changes to the parameters of the SpriteBatch.Begin method. Nothing Earth-shattering, but the changes did break many of the examples. I edited the calls to correct the errors where needed.
Chapter 5
The ResolveBackBuffer API has been deprecated. I rewrote the CaptureGameScreen method to use RenderTarget2D instead. This required changes to the Draw method as well. The general flow is (within Draw):
- Create RenderTarget2D object.
- Set GraphicsDevice to new render target.
- Draw stuff. (results are drawn to a texture)
- Set GraphicsDevice render target to null.
- Draw stuff again. (results are drawn to the screen)
Chapter 6
(Ugh.) The FillMode.Point enum has been removed, along with the FILLMODE = Point statement in HLSL. Point rendering is no longer supported as of XNA 4.0, per Shawn Hargreaves.
The simple fix (and the one that I chose) is to remove the point.fx shader from the example. If you REALLY want to render points, Shawn recommends converting each point to a tiny (single-pixel) triangle.
The “GraphicsDevice.RenderState.FillMode = FillMode.Solid” statement that was used in the example has been deprecated. You now need to use a RasterizerState object, which has a FillMode property.
Chapter 10
The previous version of XACT is no longer supported by XNA 4′s content pipeline. To fix this, I just loaded the XACT project (example.xap) into the new version of XACT and saved it (without making any changes). This automatically converted the project file to the new version.
Chapter 11
There were some significant changes to the storage APIs. I added a static helper to emulate the old APIs, based on the code found at this website. The two biggest changes are: all storage APIs are now asynchronous, and the container.Path property is no longer supported.
Chapter 14
The way that you load files from the game’s directory has changed. References to StorageContainer.TitleLocation have been replaced with TitleContainer.OpenStream.
Significant changes have been made to the GameFont class. See the notes for Chapter 21. In short, I recommend that you replace any references to the GameFont class with XNA’s built-in SpriteFont. The GameFont class is obsolete.
Chapter 19
As with Chapter 14, references to StorageContainer.TitleLocation were changed to TitleContainer.OpenStream.
Chapter 21
The byte ordering on internal storage for the Color struct has changed in XNA 4. BGRA is now RGBA. I tweaked the logic in GameFont, but the result is less than ideal. I do not plan to spend any more time on this code since XNA has provided support for in-game fonts since version 2. Changes include:
- Set the Properties / Content Processor / Premultiply Alpha of the image in the content project to false. This preserves the row markers, column markers, and encoded character data in the source image — but it makes the letters more “jaggy”.
- Set the Properties / Texture Format of the image in the content project to NoChange.
- In the GameFont class, replace Texture2D.GetData<uint> calls with Texture2D.GetData<Color>, and correct logic that depends on specific byte ordering with new Color-based checks. For example, “data[0] & ROW_COLUMN_MASK == ROW_COLUMN_MASK” becomes “data[0].A == 0xFF”.
While the changes that I made allow the GameFont library to work as before, I recommend that you no longer use it. Replace references to the GameFont library with XNA’s built-in SpriteFont. Consider this library an interesting look into how sprite fonts could be implemented, rather than as an example of how to draw text within your games.
Where’s Part 4?
I’ll try to get the source for Part 4 converted soon, but I can’t commit to a specific deadline. As with previous source updates for the book, I don’t expect the Content Pipeline example (from chapter 26) to be included in the conversion. There are plenty of other resources out there that provide guidance on this topic (see Google).
Thanks!
Thanks for your patience, guys! Enjoy the code, and let me know if you find any issues or need any help.
Oh, and if you’re reading this blog post and you’re asking yourself, “Book? What book?” — click here to see what the fuss is all about. You can read Chapter 07 here, and Chapter 18 here. If you like what you see, please feel free to buy a copy of the book here.
– joe