MSDN Evening: Introducing Microsoft XNA Express
Last week, I went to this event, and I must say it is quite a different type of event I would normally go to. But being the standard geek that I am (or maybe I'm not so standard), I had heard about this vaguely and it did not really hit me what this XNA thing was all about until I saw the two channel 9 videos last monday. I had just read the Got Game? article from the May 2007 MSDN Magazine last weekend in the garden, which sparked my interest.
XNA Express allows me, simple C# developer, to get started writing games for Windows, but, no really, BUT also for the XBox 360.
And that should just say it all. I know nothing, nada, njet, noppes of game development, but after playing around with the standard tutorials and some more tutorials and samples from the cummunity websites, I can actually get 3d models on the screen, have them moving, play sounds, change camera positions, and there are plenty more samples to try and gain even more knowledge.
Ok, so as your typical C# Developer / Team Lead / Technical Architect, what is there to gain?
Is it interesting - Yes
Is it technology - Yes
Is it cool - Oh Yes, baby, YES!
Is it useful at the end of the day - well, uhm, for the day-job, uhm ... except for maybe gaining more knowledge on how to be able to render LOB data into a 3D world as a new sort of reporting application, uhm yes, otherwise... no, but its just sooooo cool.
Going through the basic tutorial and then the Going Beyond tutorials in the Help, I did bump into a problem:
Drawing a 2D texture made the 3D model all go semi-transparent and all ugly. But the solution is really simple. And yes the solution was given by the presenter of the session, Brecht Kets. He also showed the exact same problem in the presentation. His presentation was good, built up basically following the same concepts as in the tutorials, he did not go into the Math stuff too much, no real game development knowledge was needed to understand his presentation, while at the end of it all, I did learn a lot of new concepts. Especially: most tutorials are written as spaghetti code, all code goes into the default Game class. As he pointed out, XNA is build as a component framework, enabling you to nicely encapsulate all the logic in seperate classes. Making the code 1st class, clean, refactorable, reusable and maybe testable? I have not found much on doing the game development TDD with XNA GSE. As surely when changing the behaviour of your model you do not want to be starting the app and manually/visually start testing the whole thing again, ... or now do you, I mean you'll be playing your game!
He did fall out of luck though, as his Xbox kept crashing before the presentation, so he was unable to show off some really cool stuff on how easy it is to get it all working and going on the Xbox 360.
Some resources:
I'm currently going through the
Code4Fun - Beginning Game Development tutorials, as these explain some basic concepts. They are not written for XNA, but for Managed DirectX, but the concepts are still interesting.
Have fun!
posted @ Sunday, April 22, 2007 11:09 AM