XNA: A new start for C# and gaming?
So today Microsoft released a beta of their new XNA framework and development environmnet for developing games. Basically XNA is a C#-only, and essentially what was managed DirectX but just tarted up a bit, and importantly for some, will allow for decent homebrew development on the Xbox360.
I had a look at the game compeonent video on the XNA MSDN blog and I must say, I'm pretty interested in how this is going to turn out - the game components is a pretty logical way to do things considering the whole OO thing for .NET. Check out the 15 minute video - its pretty convincing stuff from a simple point of view. Unfortuneately, there aren't really any components available yet - I thought the ones in the video were kinda like "generic" ones included but they aren't which is pretty disappointing. But I am pretty sure this is going to really take off.
Easy-Peasy Game Engines?
Just thinking about it a bit, using the game components its going to be really easy to more or less "throw together" a game engine. Based on what I've seen so far it seems like this sort of thing will be pretty easy. Consider if you have these components to play with:
- A component to load in and manage your meshes
- A component to load in and manage your BSP maps or maybe some terrain (it wont matter to anything else which you chose because its all abstracted away)
- A component to deal with input and player views (first/third person etc - again abstracted away so it wont matter)
- A component to do the physics for it all without you even doing anything.
At the moment there dont seem to be many components available, but I am sure that will change rapidly. Its pretty exciting in a way, and I'm not even into games that much!
I really liked the way .NET really "organised" everything with the class library and did away with so much boiler plate code - it looks like Microsoft have done the same thing with DirectX now. There seems to be a real stigma with performance for managed stuff, but I guess we'll see in time how fast or slow this really is.
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