Datasheet

away. Most big game studios also can’t just adopt every new technology right away. The studio might

be in the middle of a big project and also might have a very big code base, which is not easy to port. In

the long run, however, code will get converted and we will move up the ladder of high-level languages.

Figure 1-15 is an old picture I did to show the differences between DirectX with C++ and Managed

DirectX in C#. As you can see, MDX code can be half the size of unmanaged code. For XNA, the code

would even be shorter and it gets much easier to load textures and show them on the screen, but the

comparison to MDX gets harder because the concepts are different.

Figure 1-15

Getting Used to the Content Pipeline

As you saw earlier with your first XNA project, it is quite easy to just drag and drop a texture into your

game project inside XNA Studio. Although it is nice to have all your game content in one place and side

by side with the code, there are a couple of things you have to remember. Most of the projects I have seen

throughout my career have not put the textures, models, or shaders directly in the Visual Studio project.

The reason for that is that it is much easier to just copy a few files over and then let the game load them

directly. By default, Visual Studio will also not copy any content files to your output directory; you have

to change the Build Action from

None to Content and set the Copy to Output Directory setting to Copy

if newer

. This is quite a hassle and XNA makes it a little easier.

Chapter 1: Introducing XNA

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