Rawr Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 Not sure if this fits in this part of the forum, I wasn't sure where to put it. So if it needs to be moved, please move it so its not in the wrong spot and all that =). Anywho, I was just wondering if anyone here has had any experience with Microsofts XNA tool at all. I'm thinking of eventually learning how to use it, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to pick up and all that jazz - or rather how effective it really is. There are a lot of community games on Xbox Live that are really poor, most of them aren't even games. I imagine though it is more or less along the lines of how much effort you put in = how much quality you get out of it, since there are a couple that look alright. So if anyone has any thoughts about XNA before I make a decision on whether or not eventually I will pick it up (which probably won't be until I get a new computer) I'd love to hear 'em. I just want to have somewhat of an idea of what its all about before I do try. Reason I ask this is because I'm going to be taking 3D Animation and Game design in college next year and when its all said and done I want to try and make a game based off the knowledge I get out of those courses and maybe put together a small demo game. If I can discipline myself to do it, I'd do it all 2D with hand-drawn visuals but that would take me ages to do haha. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DimensionWarped Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 I've scratched at it a little. I don't really know anything about it... aside from that the template for it in Visual Studio is in C Sharp... which I don't really know. Thats all I have to say. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rogueyoshi Posted May 23, 2009 Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 eh, i played around with it for a bit. ported a good bit of that old sonic dash engine to it, but didn't feel like writing up editor programs for stuff like maps and animation (this was before i obtained REALbasic, which is pretty good at that sort of thing). anyways, if you've ever used game maker you should have almost no problem picking it up. my gripe is that the xna framework provides pretty much only high-level access to stuff hardware functions (understandable, since its pretty much a consumer's xbox 360 sdk), which can actually be good for new programmers. also the obvious lack of portability to other OSes. anyways, give it a download and play around with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rawr Posted May 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 24, 2009 Alright, thanks for the feedback!. I'll give it a download then and see what its all about =D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ssbfalcon Posted May 24, 2009 Report Share Posted May 24, 2009 My team made our Global Game Jam Game with it... though we probably should've just used Construct, MMF, Processing, or just XNA 2D in order to do it... It's very easy to get stuff on screen, move it around, etc... This is a decent tutorial to get started. Well, it's what I used... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted At the Global Game Jam, we were able to get a shell of our game working, except that making all the assets plus the game took up so much time that we realized we shouldn't have used 3D to begin with... XD For hillarity's sake: http://globalgamejam.org/games/materialism-98ms2 I recommend all you guys try to do a GGJ next year... It's held worldwide and it's extremely fun... You meet some great people, developers, and have 48 hours of fun... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted May 24, 2009 Report Share Posted May 24, 2009 XNA is pretty powerful shit. A few kids that I graduated with made a Xbox Live Arcade game in it, looked good too. I would suggest fucking around with it just for the C# knowledge. <3 managed code Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rawr Posted May 26, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 26, 2009 Alright, thanks a lot for the input guys, and the tutorial links as well! I'll definitely download this when I get a new computer (which should be at least by the end of summer) and fiddle with it in my spare time. The knowledge on how to code stuff would probably be a nice thing to get out of this as well =) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aaron C-T Posted June 15, 2009 Report Share Posted June 15, 2009 ...if you've ever used game maker you should have almost no problem picking it up. Hmm.. how similar exactly is GML to C? Could you, in theory, set up several small engine tests with the drag-and-drop interface like you would in MMF and then study the resulting GML to learn C? If not, does anyone know of another way to learn? In 11th grade, I tried reading some book, but I didn't really latch on... but if anyone knows of any good learning material/examples to look at/etc I'm definitely down. I'm looking to design something and, ideally, get it to run a Zune via XNA. Overall I don't think my concept is too "out there" or complicated but... Edit: And I've bookmarked the link ssbfalcon posted, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rogueyoshi Posted June 16, 2009 Report Share Posted June 16, 2009 because gml is similar enough to c#, one with a good grasp on the coding fundamentals could learn it easily. there isn't a drag and drop interface though. its pure code. when i was learning it, i just used the tutorial links on the xna homepage and kept the documentation close by for reference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Ehhhhhhhhh I wouldn't say they're similar in terms of coding fundamentals. GML is weakly typed with weird array issues. C# is completely managed code. Read a book on programming language concepts to understand a lil more. They both share C-styled syntax, but that's about where the similarities end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aaron C-T Posted June 17, 2009 Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Ah. So basically grab a book and try and come back to it in a few months? Fair enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epon Posted June 22, 2009 Report Share Posted June 22, 2009 Yeah cuz like I said above... knowing C# is good regardless if you're making games or mobile phone applications, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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