0.17 Xna0132-a simple game program with on-screen text  (Page 3/13)

Complete listings of the Sprite class and the Game1 class are provided in Listing 13 and Listing 14 near the end of the module.

Before getting into the game program, however, I will explain a very short program that illustrates how to draw on-screen text. I personally found the documentation on this topic to be somewhat confusing.

How to draw on-screen text

The difficulty that I encountered in drawing on-screen text was not in the writing of program code. Rather, it was in getting ready to write program code.

Font availability

Before getting into the details, I want to mention that fonts are typically copyrighted items of intellectual property and you must be careful whendistributing fonts for which you don't have distribution rights. To assist you in this regard, the information shown in Figure 2 currently appears in the documentation .

Identifying the font families

You should be able to select Fonts in the Windows Control Panel and see a list of the font families that are installed on your machine. The problem is that the names of the font families are not an exactmatch for the file names listed in Figure 2 .

Matching font families to font files

Figure 3 shows my best guess as to the correspondence between font-family names and the file names listed in Figure 2 . Font family names are on the left and font file names are on the right.

You will learn shortly why we care about the font-family names.

Getting ready to draw on-screen text

Before you can draw on-screen text you must add a Sprite Font to your project from the IDE during the design process.

Here is my interpretation of the steps required to add the Sprite Font to your project:

• Open your project in Visual C#.
• Right-click your Content folder in Solution Explorer , select Add , and then click New Item .
• From the Add New Item dialog box, click Sprite Font .
• Change the text in the Name field to [Font-Family Name].spritefont , such as Lindsey.spritefont for example.
• Click the Add button. This will create a new XML file named [Font-Family Name].spritefont , which will be opened in the IDE editor.
• Click the file named [ Font-Family Name].spritefont in the Solution Explorer and note the Asset Name that is displayed in the Properties window (such as Lindsey for example).
• The XML file contains an element named FontName . Change the contents of that element, if necessary, to match the name of the fontfamily that you specified.
• Change the contents of the Size element in the XML file to the point size you desire for your font.
• Change the contents of the Style element in the XML file to the style of font to import. You can specify Regular , Bold , Italic , or Bold, Italic . Note that the contents of the XML elements are case sensitive.
• Specify the character regions to import for this font. Character regions specify which characters in the font are rendered by the SpriteFont . You can specify the start and end of the region by using the charactersthemselves, or by using their decimal values with an ampersand-pound sign prefix. The default character region includes all the characters between the space and tildecharacters, inclusive.
• Follow the instructions in the comments in the XML file to make any other changes to the contents of the XML elements that are appropriate foryour program.