XNA Framework

Is it worth downloading and playing around with? Anyone here have experience with it? Is there anything it can do that you can't do more easily with b3d/bmax?

I've tried it. It's worth a download and imo is very good.

Some poeple hate it though and others love it. There's tons of code avialble for it.

If you know how to use C# then give it a try. :)

Like Marmite.... I love it and definitly say its worth a play! ;)

Dabz

Its definitely interesting technology and for many indies the best and fastest way to get in the business, not taking the potential X360 market into account at all.

As owner of TorqueX Pro its even more interesting for me as I have a source engine at hand to work with it ... (got free upgrades as I own TGB, TGE, TGEA ...)
Haven't done anything with it thought as I am no fan of VS Express and am waiting for its port to XNA 2.0 therefor where I can use VS Pro again

what does it actually do?

XNA is a set of programming lbraries for using with C# which makes games programming easier, it's basically a prebuilt framework for you to use to write games in. The plus point is that you can also compile programs to work on XBox 360 and PC without having to change any source code (assuming you've written the game properly).

Really? Everyone I know who used it to get started in game development as a business now desperately wishes they chose something else. The general consensus seems to be that it's a pleasure to develop with and a nightmare to deploy with.

XNA is VERY good but the games it makes have higher requirements than blitz games.

I guess it will become more popular now that MS have announced the community games thing for the 360, but I wouldn't use it for PC games.

XNA 1.0 was a nightmare to deploy, thats right.
But the GSE part of 2.0 made quite some stuff far more straight forward.
Until DX gets fully replaced by something with an OO design like MDX, I think XNA is far better suited for the common usage than DX, at least to me. Too many "hidden traps" on the DX end to do it as hobby if you want to create a game and not work 12-24 months on the technology first with todays hardware generations and their "behaviors" (lesson learnt from TGEA development. Never had that much frustration thanks to NVIDIA and ATI drivers, not even with B3D). Before I would do such a thing I would use Truevision 3D or even GDK

Oh I see, I didn't realize they'd fixed the deployment problems with 2.0.

does it have stuff like drawimage and loadsound?

XNA is based on something called a content pipeline, and handles sprites using a SpriteBatch object, so, to load images, you do this:-

//Load the image
cursor = content.Load<Texture2D>("cursor");
//Create a new sprite batch for drawing
spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(graphics.GraphicsDevice);

Then to draw it, you do this:-

spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);
spriteBatch.Draw(cursor, cursorPosition, Color.White);
spriteBatch.End();

I have a few little examples here:-

http://www.syntaxbomb.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=83

depends on what you mean by deployment problems. To deploy to your 360, yea it's pretty straight forward. To get a friend to play it on their PC? still a nightmare as you have to get them to get XNA runtime,.NET 2.0, and a DX update. Lot of hoops still imo. But with XNA GS 3.0 around the corner and the XNA community arcade also coming out this spring that'll solve a lot of deployment nightmares [in terms of getting friends and other users a chance to play your game], since it'll basically make the 360 the primary platform of choice to develop for.

dabhand: looks interesting man,

Well, if someone wants to play XNA is clear that he must have installed it :)
little by little it will be installed on all systems of interest I would guess

.NET shouldn't be a problem, should be installed on anything that supports XNA unless its a cool morron with disabled autoupdate. Many games today use it for different aspects like the game starters etc. So little of a problem as well
DX updates are standard due to the bimonthly DX update periodicity. This is needed for pure DX9 games as well.

On the other hand you need to distribute the VC redist installer as many users don't have professional (expensive) apps and do not have the dlls on their system.

-> either offer the links or if you distribute through disk, put it on it as auto installers.

The main thing that is a Plus that i know of with it is the fact you can play your games on the 360. Thats pretty awesome.

Whats the PS3-equivilant of XNA? Does Sony have such plans for PS3, and what would the tools cost?

there is no equivalent and sony has no plans for that.
you wouldn't be able to program their platform anyway. Thats a professional only thing due to the CPU

why would a gamer care if a game is made with XNA, Blitzmax, or just C++? They want to just play. I'm referring to PC games of course (360 is a different matter). Just from personal experience the few little demos and small games I made with XNA I've received e-mails regarding how to get the game up and running beecause it didn't 'just run'


true .NET is a little more wide-spread but I hate to release something knowing someone might run into the issue and then having to provide them with a 22MB dl for a 5-10MB game (not to mention the install time).


I figured this was the case also. But surprisingly, even I had problems getting XNA running on some of my gaming rigs (which played games such as bf2142 and HL2). Despite having an 'updated' DX i still had to run the web installer to get a minor update to DX. Again, another loop to jump through (as far as I know, DX doesn't auto-update). This particular issue however, could have changed since the release of XNA 2.0


last I checked you weren't technically 'allowed' to include the DX installer (and maybe possibly the .NET installer as well, not too sure though) into your own installers and the best you could do was provide a DL link. And also if you do put the installers there, it just bloats your installer (22 for .net, and however big the DX update would be). As opposed to just being able to simply zip up a blitzmax game and have good confidence that it'll run on most PC's.

I probably come off as hating XNA, but that's certainly not the case. I really enjoy using it, and I'm still developing with it. But in the current scheme of things, XNA seems more targetted at 360 rather than PC distribution, whereas blitzmax is setup for easy PC distribution.

You always have been allowed to integrate the DX installer. MS even highly recommends it that you run it silently during the install to guarantee DX installation consistency.

XNA and .NET download links can easily be pointed out and put into the system requirements.

As mentioned, with VC++ + DX you aren't much better. That as well means 2 redistributions to install, so only one less than with XNA but with far more work on your end to get your DX9 technology run as bug free and memory leak free as XNA will right from the start.