Should i start with xna

There are also plenty of famous XNA games out there. You'd choose the Unreal engine or the Source engine or similar. Don't learn XNA. Learn C , using XNA as a stepping stone. It's right now the most promising high level language for game development. XNA can serve as a good reference for the common issues to be found in game development, taking care of nasty stuff like low level graphics programming or common asset management.

It is also easily integrated with scripting languages IronPython, Lua , which is very common in modern games. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Is it worth It? Asked 9 years, 11 months ago. This first chapter will help you get everything installed so you can dive in and start developing in XNA 3. XNA Game Studio 3. The screenshots should look the same or at least similar across versions, but you should be aware of the version used to create these examples in case there are discrepancies.

With XNA 3. However, some examples may require Shader Model 2. DreamSpark is a Microsoft initiative that allows students access to professional versions of Visual Studio and other design and development tools at no cost.

At the welcome screen Figure , click Next. The next screen in the install Figure asks whether you want to allow Game Studio and XNA games to communicate through the firewall on your computer. It is recommended that you allow these communications. Also, people are very friendly and helpful on this forum if you take the time to at least do a quick google before hand and demonstrate that you've put a little effort in before asking for help.

I think we are done with this thread. Joined: Aug 31, Posts: I'd just second getting a C book and doing some simple console stuff first.

I gather you haven't done anything in C before, so going straight to Unity might be overwhelming. Tanel , Oct 24, Joined: Jan 26, Posts: XNA is dead, but it really wouldn't hurt to go through some really good tutorials and use some of the lower level graphics APIs.

Set up some vertex buffers, textures, shaders, etc. You will have a better understanding of how things work under the hood and more appreciation for everything Unity is doing for you on multiple platforms. Joined: Feb 4, Posts: Second: pick up a book on C with preferably visual studio as the IDE. Then start recreating some SIMPLE games that are popular and put some of your own touch on them as a learning experience. Hope this helps!! Don't get ahead of yourself this is not a one day or a week thing, take your time!

Might take a month or two, but with patience in mind you will come out of it with a better understanding! Last edited: Oct 24, Darkoo , Oct 24, Thank you all for your answers! That's my bad.

I'll also work harder on looking stuff up before I ask. I just find it some much easier to talk to real people. Oh well. Tanel I plan on getting a C book but for now I have a written tutorial online. Its worked really well for me so far. I've done more in it then in the other video tutorials I watched. The first thing is that it doesn't handle 3D very well -- that doesn't mean it can't, but if your project is in 3D you should probably be looking into Unreal , Unity or even CryEngine instead of MonoGame.

If you're looking into starting your first project and you don't have a lot of experience, it's likely MonoGame is not really the engine for you. You can get going if you have a minimum understanding of C , but if you don't and your project is in 2D, GameMaker will more likely be a good fit for you.

MonoGame requires a lot of building upon. You have no tools or pre-built game components. This can be very daunting to someone just starting out and can slow your process of getting up and running with your first project. Happ continues: "It is definitely more geared towards people who can program their own thing.

Because MonoGame finds its roots in XNA, which has been retired for almost seven years, online resources are scarce. There is a small but strong online community of MonoGame developers more on that below but few official resources. MonoGame experts are also quite under the radar. Since they work documentation-less through a decade of practice, they don't disseminate that much knowledge. You can find some documentation on this page , but don't expect official support.

Since it's not a paid engine or service I don't think there's any customer support, so you need to go into things understanding that. While Happ reckons recruiting experienced MonoGame developers is essentially as simple as finding C coders, some of our interviewees believe it's actually not so easy. Another topic about which our respondents were in disagreement is how quick it is to get something working with MonoGame.

And that is why the studio switched to Unity for Snowtopia. We actually started [Snowtopia] with MonoGame, which I used for several projects before. In general I prefer MonoGame because it's more hands on, it's more flexible. But because the game is in 3D, I switched to Unity to have all the ease of having a rendering engine and material system -- it just handles all the added complexity of doing something in 3D.

And he's not the only one thinking that for some aspects, Unity is a better alternative. As always when it comes to discussing the best approach to starting with a new engine, most of the advice given revolves around making good use of the community.