2.2 Load a Model

2.1 Creating a Blank project -> Load a Model -> 2.3 Models and Entities

The XNA Framework is designed to handle a lot of the grunt work that many games spend many man hours on! Part of this is just the loading of the models, textures and shaders.

At this point we're simply going to follow the XNA Framework 1 Tutorial. Which can be found in the XNA help. 

Once you get to the end of tutorial 1 you should be able to see a rotating space ship.

At this point I'm going to replace the space ship with a Slightly more Machines like model!

I've had to tweak a number of things:

• Model loading code to load this model and not the space ship (duh!)
• Camera distance. The machines models have a "natural" scale of metres. So 5000 in z is 5km away into the screen!
• I'm applying a double rotation during rendering to shift the model into the default axis set of DirectX. The Machines models were all modelled on their sides and we had a different view of the world (ho ho). For simplicity it makes an awful lot of sense to stick with one of the major conventions. We'll choose XNAs convention. Of course, I should just re-export the models from my favourite modeller or nobble the X files directly. I may do that later on!
• I've added some keyboard handling code so that I can move the model around with the arrow keys and press escape to exit.

Here is the zip file for the Knight (level 3 aggressor). OriginalKnightLevel3.zip

Here is the C# - it looks remarkably like the XNA tutorial code at this point. The explanations in the XNA help text (e.g. about rotations, Vectors, Keyboard, etc) are sufficient that I'm not going to add anything.

Comments on the Code though as presented:

• The Keyboard handling is rubbish and needs to include user configurable files right from the get go. This supports localisation and preferred keys later on.
• The model itself is VERY old. It was built back when the 3DFX was the most powerful card on the market. The nVidia TNT had just about been released. As such it shows a number of things: 1) It has a LOT of textures, not just one. Implies lots of state changes during rendering 2) It doesn't have normals for bump mapping. 3) It's pretty low poly (always good!)
• The use of global (essentially) variables is obviously not a good thing.

Complete Solution at this stage can be downloaded here. RTSTest1_2.2.zip

 

Next: 2.3 Models and Entities

(c) Hal Angseesing 2007 All Rights Reserved.