Hi,

I'd like to make a 2d game with camera panning, zooming and rotation (think 'worms'). Presumably the best way to do this is by rendering a lot of quads on a plane and having a camera look directly at the plane. Can anyone point me towards tutorials or other resources to get me started. (What would be really useful would be a version of SpriteBatch that allows me to specify sprite locations in world space rather than screen space.)

Thanks,
felix

you can do what you want with spritebatch easily enough.  what you need to to is have a 'fake' camera:

public class Camera
{

    vector2 position;
    vector2 scale;
    float Rotation;


}

update the camera's properties as needed and then in your draw call do something like this

spritebatch.draw( (mySprite.Position - Camera.Position), (mySprite.Rotation- Camera.Rotation), (mySprite.scale- Camera.scale))

where mySprite.Position is a world position.

this code wont work it's just to demonstrate the basic idea.  you will quickly find this gets difficult to manage and you'l probably want to implment a screne manager type class/service.

i'm building an engine that can do all of the things you want at the moment - see my sig for details - and i will update it soon with details of the screenmanager, renderingmanager and all the other bits soon.

SpriteBatch can be used to do exactly that, either by passing in a camera transform matrix to your Begin call, or just by manually offsetting the coordinates for each Draw (for instance our Tiled Sprites sample implements a 2D camera that way).

Thanks for the info guys. Personally I dont like the idea of manually offsetting, scaling and clipping things, isnt the whole point of the 3d pipeline to do that for me much quicker?

I'll have a look at the tiled sprites tutorial you mentioned and the camera tansform in the Begin call.

Thanks again
felix

You could always render your sprites as billboards in an orthographic projection..

To manage size easily you could normalise your billboard dimensions & then just use the scale components of your world matrices
 to define the width & height of each billboard in pixels..

You'd just have the manually batch your rendering & if necessary manually sort by texture too..