Been playing with Microsoft's XNA Game Studio 3. It seems hard work compared to GameStudio A7 but easier than Direct-X. I just feel that this is where I should be going as you need to know alot more about "real" 3D code.

What do you think about XNA and its relevance to the real world of games design ?

Drac.

Honestly, there is little you can do in XNA that you can't do with 3dgs.

Define 'real' 3d programming. I mean 3dgs has a Z coordinate, that implies it's 3d to me

"real" 3d code that your referring too most of the time isnt even what they use to make the games, they use c++/c# to make the engines, and then most of the time a scripting language is attached to it, so in your head what you need to know is if you want to be an engine programmer, or a game programmer.

The XNA code gives people a bit perverted impression of 3d programming. In reality it is much more technical, not just mesh.draw(), etc.

Anyway, XNA is a nice package and simple enough for quite fast development of small and maybe even mid sized games. The approach XNA provides is quite practical, at least in my opinion.

However there still are some short comings, like no integrated dynamics (physics and stuff) library.

And even if you are a game programmer, it isn't really necessary to know the underlying implementation of 3d code. It might be useful but I believe that it would be a bit smarter to pick an engine and start making tons and tons of demos. Everybody loves to see demos, including the companies that are going to hire you in the future.

XNA is a kind of a hybrid case though. It isn't an game engine, but more like a framework for making an engine. A great tool for learning about making a game engine or making games in general.

As of relevance, I think XNA is becoming fairly relevant in the indie scene.

I agree with ambassador about the fact that Xna is more a framework than a game engine, than mean you have to create most of your tool or use 3rd Party. They should have physics integrated but I mean is not this relevant because Ogre which is a graphic library don't have any. + it's a free package. if you want to have for example a collision library you just have to pay 49$ dollars for the submission ( haven't did so I'm not really aware of it)

But if you want to compare both of them XNA is great for developpers you can build you engine in no time and also it give you a better control without work around. It's coded in c# so you can't find a lot of inofrmation ( a7 too but it's not the same thing) and also the community is growing, so you can progress.

A7 is a game engine so it's supposed to be a complete package, but it's not. I can really judge the actual engine since I don't own it( just have the old A6).

But the reason I stop using complete package is some point it's interesting if you want to make your game and everyting but are limited to the game feature, you just wait for the other to your job, you get lazy and you don't really progress. This is my reason and I do understand why people don't want to bother writting their own tool or classes, but since my game didn't really to what I had in mind Xna was a good deal beacuse I didn't have to create all from scratch but it same time I was free enought to take the direction I wanted.

why bother if it doesn't run on mac or linux.

there is little you can do more with 3dgs than you can with notepad either. it's not about i-could-implemet-it-features, it's about whats-already-in-there-features and how-fast-can-i-realize-what-i-dream-of. but this duscussion is pointless in this forum, i know.

with "real" game programming, i assume he means c++ and assembler, because that's what real guys like dracula do, program games in cpp and assembler

[quote=broozar]why bother if it doesn't run on mac or linux.

Maybe because it runs on Xbox. I mean cross platform is not relevant. Look unity is just mac but it's a great engine.
3ds Max as far I know is only pc and it's a great tool. So saying yeah this is a bad tool or engine because is not cross platform is just not the point at all

Knowing general 3d programming is pretty much a fundamental aspect of programming 3d games.

Demos are boring, if you really want to learn to code properly and not be a demo kiddie then write a game, any game to the end. You will learn more writing space invaders from start to finish than writing a demo of a sphere with per pixel lighting rotating in space.

actually, it is so not.

It is till unity 2.5 sometime in `09