Summary

In this chapter you learned all about the XNA Shooter game. It not only introduced 3D effects, billboards, simple landscape rendering, and handling the game logic with all the new game classes, but it also prepared you for the more advanced racing game project you are going to encounter next.

Your graphics engine is now capable of rendering textures, 3D models, 3D effects, shaders, handling sound effects with XACT, and it handles the user input and all game classes easily for you. You are also very familiar with some of the game classes by now. The Player class for handling most of your own game logic has been proven worthy in the Rocket Commander XNA and in the XNA Shooter games. Other aspects of the game programming world like the landscape rendering and shadow mapping were also introduced for the first time in this chapter, but you learn about those advanced topics in the next chapters in greater detail.

Part IV of this book is devoted completely to a cool looking racing game. You are going to create a beautiful 3D landscape for the game and generate tracks from spline data. Additionally you are going to take a tour through the world of physics for games, which was already handled a little bit by the Rocket Commander game, but the racing game needs a much more complex model. Finally, you are going to learn about the game logic in the racing game and how to fine-tune such a big project.