Project Creation: Start Game Studio Express
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Understand the Files and Folder Structure: Open up Microsoft Explorer and navigate to Desktop/SimpleXNA, we observe:
Folder/File | Purpose |
SimpleXNA.sln | .sln - this is the solution file of the entire project. |
SimpleXNA.suo | .suo - this is data file that XNA GS uses. We will not change this files. |
SimpleXNA/Game1.cs | This file contains the Game1 class. This is the main file we will work with. |
SimpleXNA/Game1.ico |
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SimpleXNA/GameThumbnail.png |
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SimpleXNA/Program.cs | This is the container class of the Game1 class. |
SimpleXNA/SimpleXNA.csproj | This is the project description file for the .sln solution file. In general, a solution (one .sln file) can consist of many different projects (many .csproj) files. |
SimpleXNA/bin and obj | Compile result. As the names suggests, obj contains the compile object files, while bin contains the executable binary files. |
SimpleXNA/Properties/AssemblyInfo.cs | Description for the project, e.g., name to appear on the window title bar. |
SimpleXNA/Content/Content.contentproj | This is the content project description file. As will be discussed, fonts, file texture images, and audio wave files are examples of contents. We will need to describe how these contents will integrate into our project via this "content project". |
SimpleXNA/Content/bin and obj | Build results from the content project. |
Understand the IDE solution structure: Now, go back to XNA GS,
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We can examine some of the files in our project (double click on the files to open them in the editor):
Understand the structure of the application: Now, go back to GSE,
This calling sequence is true for all XNA applications. To build an interactive application, all we have to do is to change the application state according to user input during Update() and draw the changed state in Draw(). In the next two examples, we will examine how to define/draw graphical objects and interactively control graphical objects.
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Kelvin Sung Computing and Software Systems University of Washington, Bothell ksung@u.washington.edu |