XNAtutorial.com has released their 10th tutorial!

You better not wait and head over straight away, xnatutorial.com is an excellent source for video tutorials when it comes to learning to program with C# and XNA, although it is still dealing with stuff experienced programmers already know it’s enjoyable to watch. Perhaps it is his accent which does the trick, I don’t know [...]

You better not wait and head over straight away, xnatutorial.com is an excellent source for video tutorials when it comes to learning to program with C# and XNA, although it is still dealing with stuff experienced programmers already know it’s enjoyable to watch. Perhaps it is his accent which does the trick, I don’t know :P, but don’t hesitate and jump over towards tutorial number 10!

In this tutorial the first 8~10 minutes cover cleaning up some of the previously done code, making it more organized and easier to be managed later on. After that you’ll dive into a couple of new things, covering both theory and practise.

When it comes to theory the following items are covered in this video tutorial:

• Game loop timing
• Structures

Although the first might not be of that much importance yet to the starting game developer, he does explain some of the essentials of game loop timing through some nice examples. Structures are being covered greatly, although there was just one thing about them which I didn’t get to hear, being that structures unlike classes don’t have a destructor. But destructors aren’t of that much importance in C# unlike they were in C++ so it might also have been intenional not to mention it. Seeing as to how I originally come from C++ though it’s just something I’m used to of ’seeing’ there, although not always written out anymore. Alternatively I could also have just missed it ofcourse :).

As for actual game aspects the following is covered in this tutorial:

• Mass
• Rotation

Adding some weight to the balls in order to create alterations in the speeds with which balls bounce away from eachother is a nice first example of introducing physics into the game. Remembering my high school physics classes the influence of mass wasn’t that limited as shown here though, but it’s a nice startup.

The second part being rotation is quite interesting for creating games, in example if you would be working on a game like asteroids you would want your spaceship to be able to turn around it’s center when pressing the arrow keys. Some example games have been made where instead of rotating a texture there would just be another texture selected which had a rotated spaceship, this makes rotation not such a smooth process, unless you’ld create 3600 images (which would be crazy). With rotation you can use just one to achieve the same effect, which ofcourse is a much easier way of doing things.

In this tutorial though you would not be creating something cool like a spaceship or anything rotating, but an arrow instead. Ofcourse this doesn’t keep you from doing some coding yourself, create that little spaceship you want and write up the code for being able to fly with it and turn it around 360 degrees.