XNA 4.0 Workshop - Week 1 (Ch. 1-3)

Jeromy Walsh · 2011-01-18T01:30:23

Hey All, Welcome to Week 1 of the XNA 4.0 Winter Workshop. Each week there will be 30-50 pages of reading to be done, plus some supplemental materials which may be provided by myself or one of the other students or mentors. I know it's a lot of reading, but it's necessary if we're going to get through the entire XNA Framework and Library in 16 weeks. [size="4"]Reading Assignment Chapter 1 Week 1 starts off the workshop slowly with a guide on getting XNA 3.0 (now 4.0) installed on your computer. This is an essential first step as you're not going to progress very far in the workshop if you don't have XNA Game Studio 4.0 installed on your machine. With that said, the instructions are a bit out-dated. As of XNA 4.0, XNA Game Studio is now integrated into the "Windows Phone Developer Tools" and is installed along side The Windows Phone Emulator and The Express Edition of Visual Studio 2010. You can get the required download from the AppHub Download Resources page. This was confusing to many people at first as it seems to suggest XNA is now only for developing Windows Phone games. While XNA is the only way to develop hardware accelerated games for Windows Phone 7, it is NOT just for developing Windows Phone games. Once you've installed the Windows Phone Developer tools you can launch it or Visual C# 2010 (Express or Studio) and make games for both PC, Xbox 360, AND Windows Phone. Note: The Windows Phone Developer Tools only works on Windows Vista or Windows 7. If you happen to have Windows XP still (upgrade to Win7), there is a separate installer that just includes the XNA Game Studio 4 extension to Visual Studio 2010. In this case, you will not be able to develop WinPhone7 games and you'll need to have a separate version of Visual Studio 2010 pre-installed on your machine. As with previous versions of XNA, the extensions work for both the full Visual Studio 2010, as well as the express edition. Chapter 2 Chapter 2 of the book assumes you have an interest in developing XNA games for the Xbox 360 and shows you how to create an Xbox 360 game, how to purchase the required Creators Club Subscription (if you're interested in deploying to the Xbox 360 - not required for the workshop), how to connect your Xbox 360 to your PC via a LAN connection, and finally, how to deploy and debug your game on the Xbox 360. After that, it goes into basic information on how to manage games for multiple platforms, including how to copy your project from one platform to another. With XNA 4.0, Microsoft has added the Windows Phone platform as well. So any project you make for either PC, Xbox 360, or WinPhone 7 can easily be exported to another platform with a few clicks. Note also that XNA Game Studio 4.0 comes along with a Windows Phone Emulator. So even if you do not own a WinPhone (Like me), it's still possible for you to "test" your games on that platform. As a side note, deploying to the Xbox 360 or WinPhone emulator is a time-consuming process, and debugging is also more tedious. In general, I like to develop a game for the PC first, work out all the bugs/kinks, and then port the game to the chosen console. This means I have faster iterations while developing the game, and only really need to spend time deploying to the consoles when I test the games on those platforms. Does this sometimes mean I'll have unexpected surprises when I change platforms? - Yes. But the time I save in development more than makes up for the time I spend trying to figure out what's different on the new platform. Note: As the workshop progresses I'll point out key differences between the consoles so there's fewer surprises for readers. The first, which isn't entirely relevant yet, is that the x86 architecture is a little-endian architecture, while the Xbox 360 is big-endian. This means if you're serializing data between PC and Xbox 360 (such as with networking or shared files), then the order of your bytes within a word or dword will be wrong. The Windows Phone 7 is bi-endian, so it's up to the OS to determine. Fortunately, the .NET Compact Framework has a static field that allows you to test whether your application is running in big or little endian: BitConverter.IsLittleEndian. Chapter 3 Chapter 3 is on "Performance Considerations" and is designed to help readers realize that XNA is a managed framework, and as such has some performance and memory caveats which you need to be aware of. Many of the suggestions in here will be intuitive for experienced C# or Java developers. If you're new to the Managed scene, make notes and then move on. I have a phrase I often repeat to my junior developers which I heard many years ago when I was learning about eXtreme Programming: "Optimize Last." While it is important to develop with memory and performance limitations in mind, it's far too easy to get caught up in the "optimization" phase of development and forget to actually finish the project. This is a form of procrastination for many people. So while you do need to "Measure, Measure, Measure...." don't start measuring and optimizing until you've finished the project or until you reach a point where performance is so poor it makes development difficult. The second part of Chapter 3 is source code for a benchmarking framework. Please note that it will not compile for XNA 4.0 as XNA 4.0 had many breaking changes in the Graphics API as well as the GameTime class. I'll provide functional XNA 4.0 Source Code a little later (my laptop is out of juice and it has my projects on it), as well as supplemental material indicating why the source code doesn't work. [size="4"]Supplemental Reading Below is a list of supplemental reading that might help this week's reading make more sense to you. I am likely to add to this list over the course of the week (or even the workshop) and will make an announcement when I've added additional reading or resources. GameDevelopedia.net Tutorial #1 - This tutorial shows how to create your first "application" with XNA 4.0. *RealTime Revisited - A blog post I did about the changes to GameTime class in XNA 4.0 [size="4"]XNA 4.0 Source Code Chapter 2 Updated Source Code Chapter 3 Updated Source Code

Old Archive Archive

Started by JWalsh January 17, 2011 06:23 PM

23 comments, last by JWalsh 13 years, 3 months ago

Chr0n1x

100

January 17, 2011 09:34 PM

'Zack said:

'Mohanddo' said:

I just want to mention that if you are a student, you can get a free XNA Creators Club Academic Subscription for 12 months from MSDNAA or Dreamspark. Although i am not sure if this subscription is version specific or not. Just wanted to put that out there

My school was never recognized by the MSDNAA so I never could get the sub.

Maybe I'm wrong, but don't you have to go through your school's IT department to get authorized to access it?

For MSDNAA you have to ask your IT department if they have a subscription, however for a CC membership you just need to visit www.dreamspark.com and link your Live ID to your student email - most universities and colleges are signed up there and they just authenticate you with the university.

SiCrane

11,840

January 17, 2011 09:44 PM

One thing to mention is that the Platformer project mentioned at the end of Chapter 1 is missing from XNA Game Studio 4. An update for that has been posted in MSDN blog entry here.

Slateboard

213

January 17, 2011 09:56 PM

I see someone answered the questions about dreamspark already.

Half_Duplex

100

January 17, 2011 10:12 PM

If anyones interested, this blog entry helped me with converting some of the code to 4.0 in Ch 3.....

http://blogs.msdn.co...studio-4-0.aspx

There's also some other entries about differences with 4.0 there that were helpful.

Steve25

130

January 17, 2011 10:21 PM

If anybody needs some help converting the XNA 3 code to XNA 4 I've already been through these chapters and I have done so myself. Post them here and we should be able to help. As for getting a free Creators Club Subscription, this is true through either DreamSpark or through the Academic Alliance

shawnre

266

January 17, 2011 10:51 PM

I know it was said that big-endian vs. little-endian isnt relevant yet, but could someone elaborate on that a little more? Maybe a general synopsis of the concept.

Thanks!

My Live Space

Chr0n1x

100

January 17, 2011 11:20 PM

I know it was said that big-endian vs. little-endian isnt relevant yet, but could someone elaborate on that a little more? Maybe a general synopsis of the concept.

Thanks!

Endianness refers to the order in which bytes are arranged in memory.

For example in a little-endian machine (x86) a 4-byte integer would be stored with the least significant byte first, so when viewing the four bytes (A,B,C,D) you would see it as D,B,C,A, where D is the least significant byte, and A is the most significant byte.

The 360 on the other hand is big-endian, and so it stores its bytes with the most significant byte first (or A,B,C,D) - when communicating between the PC and the XBOX over a network - or when sending files, you need to reverse the byte order to ensure the PC (or Xbox) reads the data correctly.

Here is a visual example that might help: http://en.wikipedia....0C0Dh_in_memory

If you are only working on one platform, or you are not communicating between them then you do not need to worry, however it is always good to know and remember in case you want to do this in future. Some nice little tricks can be used for development on the XBOX if you setup a system to communicate between PC and XBOX (or even WP7)

silverwaves

100

January 17, 2011 11:26 PM

if you are going to be using the 360 game pad on the pc/lappy you will need to download the drives for it aswell
which you can get from
http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/download/download.aspx?category=gaming