Is XNA "THE" way to game development in C#?
We should take into account the financial situation in the world, it effects even giants like Microsoft. They might have slowed the production down or put it on hold for a while, but that doesn't mean that they will never continue with it. I doubt that they will make any public announcements about this, but we should wait and see.
For a rather depressing overview of the state of managed game development, see a recent entry on Promit's blog.
I kind of get the impression from the XNA lack-of-announcements that MS wanted to shift entirely into a XAML/WPF for future app development and somebody forgot to tell the people in the XNA group, so they're working on updating the framework to support that. The thing that gives me hope is that at Build there was a lot of new exciting announcements for C# development. It seems kind of silly that they'd announce clear support for a programming language and completely halt support for one of it's most popular frameworks in that language.
Delta Engine looks pretty damn awesome. It's developed by Benjamin Nitschke, the guy who wrote Professional XNA Programming as well as a slew of XNA games.[/quote]
Well that is just awesome.
With all the depressing talk about the future of XNA and DX, OpenTK is a nice OpenGL wrapper for .Net/Mono.
So obviously XNA isn't the only way, it's just one choice among several for openGL/DirectX support (basically, OpenTK for OGL; SlimDX, SharpDX and XNA for DX technologies are the biggest most popular these days) and then from there, many small and large engines that use those libraries.
So obviously XNA isn't the only way, it's just one choice among several for openGL/DirectX support (basically, OpenTK for OGL; SlimDX, SharpDX and XNA for DX technologies are the biggest most popular these days) and then from there, many small and large engines that use those libraries.
The writing has been "on the wall" for XNA for some time, but now that we have a better estimate of when its demise will be, we can remove it from our long term strategies. However, in the short term, its still a great API for beginners, and if/when MS fail to replace it with a comparable API we have the likes of OpenTK to fall back on. Just how long XNA has left depends on when MS introduce the next iteration of the Xbox, which may or may not have some managed API, but that API is unlikely to be XNA, in its current form; XNA will probably be replaced.
So really, if you are a beginner, XNA is A way to game development, just not THE way. Skills are transferable, and code can be ported.
So really, if you are a beginner, XNA is A way to game development, just not THE way. Skills are transferable, and code can be ported.
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