XNA, Good?
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Okay, i want to expand my knowledge from Dark Basic to something more... useful and less of a hobby language. I know Dark Basic Pro pretty well i'd have to say.
Is XNA a good engine to start with? because i see a lot of good games being made with it and i want to learn something different than a hobby language (i want to pursue game programming as my career). Im 16 years old and i want to know if that XNA is a good engine for me. If i work with a language long enough i get pretty good with it. That goes for Spanish too. :P
Is there anything else i need to know about XNA and C#?
Thanks for any help :D
-CMK-
First off XNA isn't an engine, there are some open sourced engines based off of XNA, but it's not an engine itself, its simply a framework. I will say for a hobbyist it is a great framework to work from. Also for a learning perspective I think it is beneficial as it introduces you to more of a "real" language than Dark Basic. It's a natural migration into C/C++ which is what most "pro" games are built with.
Also XNA does some of the grunt work for you, and gives you a lot of helper classes builtin. I think you should take the dive, play with it, there is a great community of people to help if you get stuck.
Also XNA does some of the grunt work for you, and gives you a lot of helper classes builtin. I think you should take the dive, play with it, there is a great community of people to help if you get stuck.
It is definitely pretty easy to learn. If you plan to make your own games and want to make something more advanced than a tetris clone I would say learn C# + XNA.
You've probably heard a million times that C++ is the language you should learn if you want to get into the game industry. I would reccommend that you learn xna and c#, but in the future I would recommend that you also learn c++, as most major programming jobs in the game industry require it.
You've probably heard a million times that C++ is the language you should learn if you want to get into the game industry. I would reccommend that you learn xna and c#, but in the future I would recommend that you also learn c++, as most major programming jobs in the game industry require it.
The biggest 'engine' that I know of used with XNA is TorqueX. I'm not sure in what form it is currently found in so you'll have to search around.
Otherwise simply download XNA and look on Creators Club (the main XNA community site) for Starter Kits. Starter Kits are prebuilt introduction 'games' the XNA team builds and releases with XNA. For example, you could start a new Platformer Game and you'd instantly have the ability to build the project and have a working platformer game.
I'd suggest looking at the starter kits before Torque but thats personal preference.
Otherwise simply download XNA and look on Creators Club (the main XNA community site) for Starter Kits. Starter Kits are prebuilt introduction 'games' the XNA team builds and releases with XNA. For example, you could start a new Platformer Game and you'd instantly have the ability to build the project and have a working platformer game.
I'd suggest looking at the starter kits before Torque but thats personal preference.
Just as a side note; at work we have a small team working on a game (and probably a 2nd after that) who are working completely in XNA.
General feedback being that they love it and it's so nice to just 'do things'; stuff is coming together nice and quickly for them.
General feedback being that they love it and it's so nice to just 'do things'; stuff is coming together nice and quickly for them.
I've programmed in numerous languages and tried different straight C++ based graphic engines (Ogre3D, Irrlicht) and the base DirectX and OpenGL and while I understand the useful-ness of them all and sometimes wish I had features of others, I always come back to using XNA. In reality, if you use the base DX or OGL you're pretty much guaranteed to fail unless you've got a large team of very knowledgable people or lots and LOTS of time and patience.
It's been a while since I last looked into Dark Basic, but from what I remember, XNA should be quite on a compareable level when it comes to graphics/sound and so on as Dark Basics build in function. It's not realy an engine (as Dark Basic isn't, too) but comes with a lot of basic stuff already done for you. Like you can get a rendreing window up and running quite fast, load and draw sprites and models and stuff with only a few lines code ... .
So, coming from Dark Basic you should feel quite at home there once you learnd C# and the basics of OOP.
So, coming from Dark Basic you should feel quite at home there once you learnd C# and the basics of OOP.
I know java pretty thoroughly at the moment and want to start making better quality games (based on the work I'm doing in java) in C#.
I've heard from quite a few sources that C# is better than Java for games and things like that (because it is supposedly faster).
What I was wondering is, what is the learning curve from Java to C#? Also, will I be able to pretty much recreate my old game code in C#?
I've heard from quite a few sources that C# is better than Java for games and things like that (because it is supposedly faster).
What I was wondering is, what is the learning curve from Java to C#? Also, will I be able to pretty much recreate my old game code in C#?
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