XNA 4.0 GDBE – Chapter 4/5 Review
Continuing on with the quality from previous chapters that I have now come to expect , Kurt dives right in to getting his impressive graphics straight to the screen. He starts in straight away with many of the utility classes needed to put together a standard top down space shooter and gets the basics of the game up and running in no time.
Some small code things I would have done differently:
- Many of the properties in the classes could have been automatic { get; set; } which can make the code look much cleaner (personal opinion)
- The padding parts of the asteroid collision detection system is unneeded. I actually removed it altogether in the final code and the game worked just as well
- The StarField, AsteroidManager, ShotManager, and many other Manager classes are very similar. I would consider seeing if they can be combined into a more generic class or set of classes.
- GraphicsDevice.ScissorRectangle could be used in many places instead of a hand built rectangle with the client bounds’ width and height
- Collision detection for asteroids is discussed and implemented in Chapter 4. All other collisions are in Chapter 5. These should be done together with a single CollisionManager
Some things I especially enjoyed in these chapters was the inclusion of sound and special effects. Both the particle explosions and the shooting and fire sounds are highly reminiscent of a simpler time in video games when kids still lived and died by their quarters. The final game is once again incredibly impressive for a beginner’s XNA book and I would have been ecstatic back in 2002 when I first started playing with Managed DirectX if I could have shown my friends the kinds of games that have come out of this book so far.
Book Link: http://link.packtpub.com/ZWicAE
