Progress with XNA is moving really quickly though...

I messed with a couple different physics engine (BEPU, PhysX, Newton), and I'm sticking with Newton. I have it (mostly) integrated...

I'm going to work on adding some graphics optimizations next, which means... more research! fun.... *sarcasm*


ALSO, I plan on making it similar to Leadwerks (collision through Newton & shaders for everything)

I want to have a look at XNA because i learnt most of my OOP in C# and i just like the way it works, lol.

I'm building a desktop application, but i would want to add some 3D graphics also. Is it possible to render a small 3D scene into, eg a panel or a windows form using XNA or would it be easier to just do this in DirectX/OpenGL?

Definitely use XNA. You can easily incorporate any Windows forms...

You have chosen the right track. BTW would it be possible to have the same shader type like Leadwerks, for A7 projects. It would be real cool if possible.

Yes. I agree. XNA is one solution here. But you can also choose pure OpenGL. There are a lot of tutorials describing how to put it into a MS Windows environment. There are even platform independent window / gui libraries for OpenGL.

the coolest thing about a engine is the community and the learning curve, and XNA is far from many engines. It's more a framework development. I don't know how hard is to implement c# in leadwerks but for xna it's really easy to understand the way the engine works even if you are not a coder.

@LostClimate

i did some investigation on leadwerks over the weekend and so far i have to say i like it. However in my opinion it is still an unfinished project but it looks promising.

One big issue is the low framerate in the current version (see samples below with GeForce GTS 8800 640 MB and CoreDuo 6600!!!).

The framerates on the beta version 2.1 are much higher so it can be expected this issue gets solved.

To build render scenes is pretty easy. The engine code is straight forward but it still lacks a lot of documentation to achieve the high standard of A7. But i was able to create a small scene with camera movement and lightning very easy.


As my summary this will be the engine (apart from A7 of course) i will do more investigation in the future.


Screens from the sample projects:

...? i didnt mention leadwerks... good to see what you've found anyways. :P

I am just wondering: does anybody know how Leadwerks Engine 2 is related to The Game Creators?
Both the Leadwerks company and the Game Creators have their own websites about the Leadwerks Engine:
http://leadwerks.thegamecreators.com
http://www.leadwerks.com/

Uuups. i meant @FoxZero. But good to see youre interested anyway ...