Introducing the XNA Framework and XNA Game Studio Express
Most developers I know decided to enter the computer field and specifically programming because of computer games. Game development can be one of the most challenging disciplines of software engineering-it can also be the most rewarding! Never before has it been possible for the masses to create games for a game console, much less a next generation game console. We are coming in on the ground floor of a technology that is going to experience tremendous growth. Microsoft is leading the way into how content will be created for game consoles. Soon other game console manufacturers will be jumping at a way to allow the public to create content for their machines. The great news for the Xbox 360 is that Microsoft has spent so much time over the years creating productive and stable development environments for programmers. We will be installing one of Microsoft’s latest integrated development environments (IDEs) in this chapter. Before we get to that, let’s take a look at the technology we discuss in this book-XNA.
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The Foundation of the XNA Framework
Let’s take a journey back to the days of DOS on the PC. When programming games, graphic demos, and the like in DOS, programmers typically had to write low-level code to talk directly to the sound card, graphics cards, and input devices. This was tedious and the resulting code was error prone because different manufacturers would handle different BIOS interrupts, IO ports, and memory banks-well, differently, so the code would work on one system and not another.
Later, Microsoft released the Windows 95 operating system. Many game programmers were skeptical at writing games for Windows-and rightly so-because there was no way to get down to hardware level to do things that required a lot of speed. Windows 95 had a protected memory model that kept developers from directly accessing the low-level interrupts of the hardware.
To solve this problem, Microsoft created a technology called DirectX. It was actually called Windows Game SDK to begin with, but quickly switched names after a reporter poked fun at the API names DirectDraw, DirectSound, and DirectPlay, calling the SDK Direct “X.” Microsoft ran with the name and DirectX 1.0 was born a few months after Windows 95 was released. I remember working with DirectDraw for a couple of demos back when this technology first came out.
Because of DirectX, developers had a way to write games with one source that would work on all PCs regardless of their hardware. Hardware vendors were eager to work with Microsoft on standardizing an interface to access their hardware. They created device drivers to which DirectX would map its API, so all of the work that previously had to be done by game programmers was taken care of, and programmers could then spend their time doing what they wanted to-write games! Vendors called this a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). They also developed a Hardware Emulation Layer (HEL), which emulates hardware through software in case hardware isn’t present. Of course, this is slower but it allowed certain games to be run on machines with no special hardware.
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Tags: .NET, DirectX, graphics programming, XNA
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