Hello, world. I have limited experience with programming, but I've been doing some hobbyist programming of late. I wrote a couple text adventures (in Inform 7 and TADS 2), and for the last couple weeks I've been trying to learn the basics of Visual C# Express Edition. I've watched almost all of Bob Tabor's excellent "Beginner's" videos on C#, and I feel pretty comfortable with the syntax and structure of the language. I'm interested in starting with a 2D hex-based wargame, although my grand ambition might be a turn-based wargame that uses 3D terrain, or perhaps a 3D adventure game a la Nancy Drew. I've been tootling along, whipping up a primitive little wargame interface using the visual designer in Visual C#, and I have a few questions:
1. Is XNA primarily for 3D games, or would I find it helpful for a 2D project E.g., will it make it easier for me draw units (sprites) on top of a background map, and to move the sprites without fussing over double-buffering To add drag-and-drop functionality
2. Will XNA make a 2D game "look" any better The quality of the art in my game depends more on my Illustrator/Photoshop/Blender skills, no
3. Can I still use the delightful drag-and-drop controls from VC# in conjunction with XNA I find I can make a pretty interface just by using windows forms in conjunction with my own imported bitmaps. (I want my app to be a Windows app, but not to look like one. :) )
4. If one does want to make a 3D game, why XNA rather than Torque or Ogre or Illrich or some such
5. As you can tell, I haven't downloaded the XNA Express beta yet. I've been cautious about doing so, given that MS will presumably tell us to uninstall it when the release version ships in just a couple weeks. I hate uninstalling stuff! Is my caution misplaced
Some questions about XNA & 2D games
Paul Bradley
1. Absolutely not. I haven't even touched 3D development with XNA yet. I and my site are focused entirely on 2D development. You'll also find that most of the existing tutorials out there are for 2D games (this is because the early beta didn't have easy support for 3D development). And yes, it is much easier to do 2D development with XNA and you don't have to worry aobut all the double-buffering and it's much easier to do drag and drop using XNA.
2. That is correct. I personally use GIMP (a free graphics tool with similar functionality to Photoshop) to do all of my artwork. But yest, XNA doesn't do much for your art, although it does have built in functionality to shade, tint and rotate your art allowing you to achieve some basic effects with no extra content creation.
3. No. For now, to make an interface in XNA, you rely upon your art and your coding ability to make it functional. There's hope that some "control" libraries pop-up either from Microsoft or the community in the future, but even then, they won't be drag and drop unless you create a drag-and-drop XNA interface editor yourself (which is entirely possible).
4. I can't give you all the pros and cons, but one major pro for XNA is immediate XBox360 support. When you develop with XNA you have a game ready to be played almost immediately on the XBox360 and the PC.
5. Yes. Totally misplaced. But then again, I'm the kind of guy to install betas on my PCs. ;)
I hope that help answer some of your question. I'd recommend looking around at all of the various community sites dedicated to XNA. There are a lot of great ones out there. Once you've got one, you pretty much have access to all of them because everyone has been great about linking to each other.
I really can't recommend developing with XNA highly enough and for the type of game you're describing, XNA is a perfect fit.
enric vives
Well I am no expert by any stretch but I will attempt to answer your questions as best I can.
1. Is XNA primarily for 3D games, or would I find it helpful for a 2D project E.g., will it make it easier for me draw units (sprites) on top of a background map, and to move the sprites without fussing over double-buffering To add drag-and-drop functionality It is primarily a 3D engine but has good support for 2d as well. It will definitely aid you in animating things along without having to worry too heavily on flippin buffers.
2. Will XNA make a 2D game "look" any better The quality of the art in my game depends more on my Illustrator/Photoshop/Blender skills, no No, it won't make it look any better your materials are your materials. But if you dig deep enough you will be able to take good materials and make the most out of them.
3. Can I still use the delightful drag-and-drop controls from VC# in conjunction with XNA I find I can make a pretty interface just by using windows forms in conjunction with my own imported bitmaps. (I want my app to be a Windows app, but not to look like one. :) ) I don't really know, I have not tried messing with windows forms and XNA.
4. If one does want to make a 3D game, why XNA rather than Torque or Ogre or Illrich or some such XNA lets you target both PC and XBOX 360 at once(or close to it) and Torque is coming out with tools written for and on top of XNA.
5. As you can tell, I haven't downloaded the XNA Express beta yet. I've been cautious about doing so, given that MS will presumably tell us to uninstall it when the release version ships in just a couple weeks. I hate uninstalling stuff! Is my caution misplaced Nope, you can almost pretty much count on MS to make you uninstall and possibly run a scraping utility to really clean things off. But it is worth it. I am having a blast working with this stuff. I don't know squat about graphics, especially 3d but I am up and running and having fun. I think they are doing a great job with this and I honestly don't know how Sony will ever be able to compete long term as these tools get more and more mature.
Roman Benko.
XNA isn't a game engine, it's a framework. The ability to write a 3D engine is there however
yln
rsnewbie