Getting started with XNA

[prog]

Contrary to what Wikipedia implies, Microsoft's new XNA Game Studio 2.0 is a free download. I liked it so much I installed it twice! Actually I installed it once on my purely-virtual VMWare Windows machine, and when it finally got up to the part where it was ready to compile its sample game, it went "Duh, I can't find a 3D card." So I killed that and put it on my Boot Camp partition instead and now it all works. And so apparently I have to boot into Windows to do any work with it, which kind of stinks.

I haven't researched this deeply yet, so maybe I'll still luck out. I hope so, because doing anything in Windows is like feeling my way through a fog, while having left my glasses at home. It isn't (entirely) Windows' fault; I'm just used to how things work on Macs. I grow a new engram every time I hit ctrl - ← to go back a word and end up warping to the previous page, because the ctrl key is actually the command key here in the bizarro world. So for now I'm moving the cursor around by mousing and generally partying like it's 1992.

Anyway, I'm excited, coz XNA 2 supports XBox Live out of the box. You can't actually distribute an XBox Live-using game without Microsoft's OK, but I'm planning on getting that covered so that's fine. It ships with two example games, a basic local-play one and a network game. The former is a port of SpaceWar!, and how can I not totally respect that?

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Spacewar was the first program I wrote of any significant size, when I was 14 or so. It had pseudo-Newtonian mechanics, torpedoes, and a gravity well at the center of the screen: you started at a standstill, and had to burn quickly to set up an orbit and not fall into the sun. It was implemented in MS-DOS QBASIC, using that platform's vector-graphics extensions (which let you draw a sprite and then use higher-level routines to rotate and position it).

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

XNA is free but uploading to the 360 service is $10/mo. That much lets you distribute to other people with the "creator's club" membership.

If windows development is too strange, bear in mind you could develop all of your systems using Mono (which is very good these days) under OSX and build a light compatibility layer to hide the XNA-specific stuff... just a thought.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about Mono (beyond their watermark 1998 album Life in Mono which still holds a valued place in my MP3 rotation)! Will investigate.

Is it $10/mo on top of the $100/year to join the creator's club in the first place? :P (I haven't sprung for the latter yet, but it's inevitable.)

Are you in THE CLUB?

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

It's $10/mo OR $100/year. Not both. :)

Mono is an open-source implementation of the CLR environment, making it genuinely cross-platform. It's certainly good enough to run NAnt and NUnit, a build tool and unit testing framework respectively.

I am not in the club RIGHT NOW. The Metaplace alpha is currently eating up what little spare experimentation time I have.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Hey, metaplace. I've been curious about that. Does it have potential? (Can you say?)

Unhelpful comment

[prog.livejournal.com]

OMG I can't help but immediately parse this as "Meatplace", no matter the context. I am cracking up.

Re: Unhelpful comment

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

You are not the first to notice that. :)

I've been meaning to throw some juicy clip-art and sound effects into a world and make Meatplace, actually. This weekend, perhaps.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I can tell you what's been publicly released plus my first impressions. :)

They have some very good ideas but it's early days yet. They're going about it the right way: separating the protocol, client and server so any part of the system could be switched. I wrote a python script to upload code to their server using the RESTful web interface, for example.

It's already enough to make simple games. The server runs Lua, which is plenty powerful enough (if a little quirky). They ran a developer chat a months or so ago and they had over 100 people chatting and walking around in one room (with pathfinding) and it was very stable.

They also just released a chat applet based on their client/server tech which you can use on MySpace and Facebook. It'll use the login information of either (using OpenSocial) and bridge between them. I gather it's all written in the Lua-based scripting language, nothing custom, so in principle anyone could copy the functionality.