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.