Professional XNA™ Programming: Building Games for Xbox 360™ and Windows® with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Fine-Tuning and "Modding" the Racing Game

You are finally going to learn about all the details of the Racing Game here. In this chapter, you learn all about the game screens used in the racing game and the game logic, the scoring system, and everything else you need for the game itself. Most of the rendering techniques for the landscape and the track were already discussed in Chapter 12, but this chapter shines a little more light on the whole shadow mapping thing. Thanks to the previous chapter, which covered everything about the game physics and car controlling, you should now be able to plug in this code and start actually testing out the game itself.

The whole purpose of this chapter is to get you familiar with the racing game and the underlying code. At the end of this chapter you should know everything you need to create your own game modifications (better known as mods) of the racing game. A game modification can be as simple as just changing a couple of graphics and 3D models or it can change the whole game logic in a way that it is no longer a racing game. The Rocket Commander game, for example, was also mod-able, but the game logic and the rendering code itself were pretty much fixed. You could more or less just change the models and add a little bit of game logic. Although most Rocket Commander mods looked quite different (see Figure 14-1), the game logic was always similar. The game principle in Rocket Commander is always to fly around and avoid colliding ...