Professional XNA Game Programming-For Xbox 360 and Windows

Benjamin Nitschke

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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© 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

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ISBN: 9780470126776

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nitschke, Benjamin, 1980-
Professional XNA game programming: for Xbox 360 and Windows / Benjamin Nitschke.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-12677-6 (pbk.)

1. Computer games--Programming. 2. Microsoft XNA (Computer file) 3. Computer games. I. Title.
QA76.76.C672N58 2007
794.8'1526--dc22
2007007059

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to all people that helped me in becoming a game programmer, especially all the
programmers out there creating engines and libraries, sharing knowledge, and writing reusable code to
help out fellow programmers.

About the Author

Benjamin Nitschke is the founder, lead programmer, and game designer at exDream entertainment. He is 26 years old, lives in Hannover, Germany, and also became a DirectX MVP of Microsoft in 2006 for his outstanding work in the DirectX community, especially with the free game Rocket Commander.

He started young-at the age of 9 he bought his first computer, a C64. He did not have many games, but he was very eager to type in commands on the C64, and from that to writing the first applications and games in Basic was not a big step. A few years later he finally got a PC (386) and started some small game projects (Tetris clones, shoot-em-up games, and so on). exDream entertainment was founded 10 years ago, and they released a couple of smaller games until the first RTS game Arena Wars was created. Arena Wars was the first commercial .NET game ever and was released in 2004, where it received more than 20 awards worldwide, especially for the great multiplayer modes.

Recently Benjamin has developed a couple of free open source games like Rocket Commander and the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit and many game modifications for these games. These games feature many video tutorials and a good documentation and code style to help beginners create their first video games. The video tutorials were watched more than 100,000 times and the games were downloaded and played even more often than that.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to thank my parents for not supporting me at first in my childhood to work with computers. Only in this way did I become insanely interested and motivated in programming even without knowing anyone else that even had a computer.

I want to thank Chris Webb for giving me the opportunity to become an author. I also want to thank Kenyon Brown, Jim Perry, and everyone else at Wiley. It was an absolute pleasure to work with all of you.

I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends supporting me in my game projects. Thanks to Enrico Ciesiek for helping me out with the chapters and thanks to Christoph Rienaecker for giving me so many cool 3D models for my games. Thanks also fly out to Boje Holtz, Leif Griga, and Manuel Nitschke for testing and feedback.

Without the hard work of the XNA team, and also the .NET, DirectX, and Xbox 360 teams at Microsoft this book would not have been possible. They are not only responsible for creating XNA, DirectX, .NET, and many other frameworks that made this book and the games in it as useful as they are, but they are also incredibly cool guys, who are easy to talk to and very supportive. I especially want to thank Christina Storm, Tom Miller, Mitch Walker, Dave Mitchell, Dirk Primbs, and Uwe Baumann at Microsoft.

Finally, I also want to thank my family and friends for supporting me throughout the time I wrote this book. They may be used to the fact that I sometimes do not sleep for a couple of days just focusing on my projects, but it might not have been easy for them during that time. In a way, this is my gift to all of you.