Learning XNA 3.0

Converting a Project to Run on the Xbox 360

Now that you have a connected Xbox 360, let's see just how easy it is to deploy an XNA Game Studio project to your Xbox 360 machine.

The rest of this chapter deals with converting the 3D game you built in this half of the book and preparing it for deployment to the Xbox 360. Open the project from Chapter 15 and use that project throughout the rest of this chapter.

While 99% of the code that you write can be ported from the PC to the Xbox 360 without any changes, the projects are compiled differently depending on which platform you're targeting. As you created projects in previous chapters, you may have noticed that there were options to create projects for the Xbox 360. Using one of these options will generate the same type of project as its Windows counterpart, but the project will be wrapped in a project file that will compile the game to run on the Xbox 360.

A typical method for creating games for the Xbox 360 is to create the initial project for Windows and perform the majority of the coding, testing, and debugging in that project. Then, once the game is close to completion, you can create a copy of the project for development on the Xbox 360 and concentrate on Xbox 360-specific debugging.

This is the method that is laid out in this book. You have, from the previous chapter, a complete game written using XNA for Windows. Open that project and create a copy of the project for the Xbox 360 by right-clicking the project in Solution Explorer ...