I'd have to backpedal on my original rantings and say that XNA 3.0 looks quite nice.

However, I still prefer the idea of creating a blank C# project and simply dropping in the XNA framework components I want to over using the default XNA Game Project solution in Visual Studio. That, I always found, was clumsy, clunky and full of bloat, as well as restricting me in the way I wanted to lay my code and logic out.

Also, XACT sucks balls and I honestly haven't found anyone who is exactly raving over it. I'm glad that XNA 3.0 doesn't explicitly require it and that is a good step forwards.

Quote:Original post by ukdeveloper
However, I still prefer the idea of creating a blank C# project and simply dropping in the XNA framework components I want to over using the default XNA Game Project solution in Visual Studio. That, I always found, was clumsy, clunky and full of bloat, as well as restricting me in the way I wanted to lay my code and logic out.

You might want to take a look at my minimalist templates I made. It gives you the absolute bare minimum project to use XNA Game Studio. They currently are for XNA GS 2.0, but I'm going to be making some 3.0 Beta ones in the next week or so.

Nick, your tile mapping tutorials are terrfic, I'm just going through them now. Really, they're better that some so-called professional tutorial videos I've gone through. Excellent work.

I just went through the beginner's 2-D tutorial of the Dream/create/play site. Parts of it were slightly painfull since I've been programming a while, but it does show how easy it can be to start a game with XNA.