XNA with other languages

XNA with other languages

• David d48701

  This is the site I ended up using the most. Anytime that site didn't have what I was looking for, typically I could find it pretty quick just Googling for it.
  
  Hope that helps and like I said. Once you know a .NET language like VB, it's not too hard picking up another one like C#, I'm sure you'll be up and running working on an XNA game in C# in no time at all...although when you start adding curly braces to your VB code you might feel a little silly...
  
  
  
  
  

• Alfred Kelgarries

  My opinion is that any 2+ year old game should be perfectly possible on current hardware with XNA framework and the right coding and art talent.
  
  

• Sam Bendayan

  I have another question, the XNA is out there to make game development easier and also to fill in the gap between small time developers develping for the Xbox 360.

  But, with that said using the XNA would we be able to create RETAIL quality games for th Xbox 360, or are we limited to much smaller games such as..Geometry Wars

  
  

• emepvsd

  Thank you alot, i just started writing some C# applications to get used to the syntax.

  So, it actually looks alot more proffesional than Visual Basic .NET would you have any links you could share to help me get used to the syntax

  Thank You.

  
  

• pfontyn

  C# has been easy so far just the occasional mistake in if statements and forgetting the semi-colon and creating objects were a bit tricky..lol.

  But im impressed with it btw thanks for that site it helps ALOT, any tips you may have to pass on

  
  

• Steven Bone

  If you mean Half Life/Crytek/Quake engine type stuff - its unlikley at least in the near term. Engines of that complexity and detail are tuned at the assembly language and GPU level to insane lengths by teams of experts.

  However, you should be able to get pretty close if you have the know how, time and most importantly the art skills.

  
  
  

• Martijn Mulder

  Ahhh thats good :-P i was hoping they weent just focusing on 2D development.
  

• slowcoder

  Practice. Make Google your best friend. Stay active in the forums.
  
  You won't believe the awesome content out there in the community already. Monitoring these forums is the best way of finding out when new stuff comes out for each of the sites. And there's a lot of very helpful people here. Stick with it, start small and build up your skill sets in incremental chunks so you don't get burned out or frustrated too quickly.
  
  Most of all, make sure you're having fun.
  
  
  
  

• fbalas

  Well, in a generic sense the XNA framework can do anything you want it to. It's not a physics engine, it's not a drag and drop game maker. What the XNA framework does is make creating a game easier by taking a way the need to know all the low level stuff like game loops, setting up communication with the graphics card, setting up communication with keyboards and other input devices and lets the developers focus on their game logic.
  
  With the release of beta 1, the main focus of the community has bee no 2D game development and there has been a ton of content and tutorials created showing that. The primary reason there isn't much for 3D yet is just because the content pipeline wasn't available yet so everyone is kind of waiting for that. Once that is part of the framework then expect to see a lot of 3D tutorials and content coming.
  
  Really, I haven't heard of any limitations or types of games that the XNA framework can't do. I've made a couple small 2D games since it came out and have just been blown away by how easy they were to make.
  
  So yeah, the limit is just your imagination and the time you want to put in improving your skill as a developer.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• game-maniac

  i meant more like older first person shooters like...Quake1-3, Half-Life, and Adventure games.
  

• Bibek

  thanks alot its really helping what exactly can the XNA framework do right now
  

• eldiener

  I can't answer to the future of XNA, but currently you are capable of developing with VB.NET you just don't get some of the IDE integration features but all of the framework is still available.
  
  From what I have been told, you would not be able to make a game in VB.NET with XNA and put that on the 360 (I'm still unclear as to the "why" for that, I would think the run-times would be the same).
  
  Since you seem to be familiar with VB.NET, I would highly recommend you spend a couple of days playing with C# .NET. I think you will be surprised at how little difference there is between the two. It honestly just took me a couple of days to get the hang of the curly braces and then just bookmarked a few sites that showed me what the syntax was in C# when I wasn't sure and I haven't had an issue since.
  
  I develop with VB.NET all day at work and at home for my game development hobby, I just switch to C#.NET. It's pretty remarkable how easy that has been to do and that's the route I would recommend to you. It makes you more marketable, more flexible and opens up a whole new world of resources and tutorials available for you.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Vagif

  To answer the original question.

  1. Game Studio express only integrates with c# express. For beta 1 it was just some templates and the assemblies (which you could reference from other environments). Beta 2 has content pipeline additions and RTM will add xbox deployment neither of which will be in VB Express or in CS Pro

  2. Its possible you could write a stub in c# express to handle the content and deployment and then everything else in a VB.Net class libarry that you could then somehow reference from the c# stub. But we won't know for sure till beta 2

  3. You will have to be careful about what you use - VB.Net has its own runtime and things like the My.{...} namespace. These additional parts won't be availalbe on the xbox so your app won't work on there.

  I suspect someone will hack a way to get it to work, possibly with VS Pro too - but it won't be as elegant as using the official method and it obvioulsy won't be supported.

  
  
  
• XNA with other languages