i'm pretty lazy. i've gone through the trouble of installing xna, but i want to know if it's as extensible as i want it to be: comparable enough to irrlicht or using ogre3d to build my own engine. i barely know the standards of c#, but that's something i would learn. the attraction to xna or something like quest3d is all that's done for me, but i truly want the freedom of low level extensibility, without doing the overhead work myself, of course. it's my problem.

XNA will let you do almost anything you want to do, only with a whole heap of stuff provided for you.

[Disclaimer]I have a few comments about xna that could be seen as negative, but I actually do think it's a very nice api. I just like to give a realistic, unhyped perspective. There's a LOT of misinformation about xna out there.[/Disclaimer]

Xna is in no way whatsover comparable to ogre or irrlicht. Xna is much, much lower level than either of those libraries. Xna is actually only slighting higher level than Direct3D or OpenGL. The main high level difference is that Xna comes with a "Game" class and a few associated helper classes that greatly simplifies device management. People also hype the content pipeline as a benefit, but it's only there because consoles require it, and it can be a pain having to write new content loaders for custom content. It's also lower level in other respects, such as the lack of a fixed function pipeline.

I've seen Xna described as an engine: it most certainly is not. Ogre and irrlicht are engines. Fundamentally, Xna is still just a low level api (albeit a nice one).

So if you're asking if you can write a game engine out of the box as easily with xna as with ogre or irrlicht, then no, absolutely not. The difficulty will be about the same as using direct3d or opengl directly. Xna has some candy in the api that make some things a bit more convenient, but you still need to learn graphics programming principles, and that's 99% of the work.

But hey, whatever else can be said, it is a darn fine api, and any framework that runs managed code on a console is tops with me :)

yeah, i was under the wrong impression. it's still more of an "engine" than a strict graphics api as i've found out, but i guess i'd be better off with ogre. which is to say that i'd rather have a prebuilt engine to work with, even though i have a good amount of opengl experience. engine development interests me and i still have the beginnings of my own, but i'd rather just extend an existing one.