Appendix A: Resources

This book has covered a lot of ground, and I hope you learned enough to develop better games now. The following resources should help you out a little - I’ve included all the links, books, source code, and games that were mentioned throughout the book.

Links

Here’s a list of many important links from the book:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/

  XNA Developer Center on Microsoft’s MSDN page with the XNA Game Studio Forum and the XNA Framework Forum, which are the most active XNA forums you will find on the Internet. You can also download the latest XNA version here, read the FAQ, and see what’s new.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/

  XNA Team blog. Bookmark this one to stay up to date with the latest news from the XNA team.

• http://abi.exdream.com

  Official website of the author. You can find more games I made here, as well as Rocket Commander XNA, the XNA Shooter, and the Racing Game from this book and all the documentation and video tutorials I made for them. Additionally I suggest checking out the Rocket Commander Video Tutorials, which were pretty popular on Coding4Fun.

• http://www.rocketcommander.com

  This is the official website for Rocket Commander, which was released at the beginning of 2006, and was written for Managed DirectX originally. A new version running completely on XNA to support the Xbox 360 was released at the end of 2006.

• http://www.xnaracinggame.com

  Official website for the racing game talked about at the end of this book.

• http://www.xnashooter.com

  This is the official website for the XNA Shooter game from Chapter 11 of this book. All the other games of this book can also be found on my blog.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA

  Entry on Wikipedia about XNA, constantly updated and contains many links to other topics. On the bottom of the page are a few useful external links.

• http://xnadevelopment.com

  Nice new site with many links, tutorials, and tips to get you started in the XNA world.

• http://xnaresources.com

  Another new site with lots of news and some really useful tutorials on tile engines. Also contains a lot of game components you might like.

• http://learnxna.com

  XNA news site in form of a blog, also contains some video tutorials and focuses on learning XNA and tips and tricks with graphic tools.

• http://martinfowler.com

  In Chapter 2 unit testing and Agile Methodologies are discussed. If you want to read more about unit testing I recommend reading this website of Martin Fowler, one of the founders of this whole idea.

• http://www.nvidia.com

  Home of the Nvidia homepage and many free tools like the FX Composer, which is used in Chapter 6. You can also learn a lot about graphic card architecture, special rendering techniques, shaders, and so on from the many samples, tutorials, and documentation that can be found in the developers section.