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A Primer for Microsoft's XNA
simoniker writes "Over at the education site Game Career Guide, they've got an in-depth primer of Microsoft's XNA, including interviews with Julie Ellen and Joe Nalewabau of Microsoft about the PC and Xbox 360 indie/student homebrew construction tool, as well as chats with two developers (Benjamin Nitschke and Alex Okafor) who have worked with XNA to some notable effect. Microsoft's Ellie claims of the efforts: 'Homebrew and independent developers are often very talented and have lots of creative ideas. Being able to officially write games directly for a retail console right at home is a first and could be very empowering for them. For the homebrew and indie scene to succeed we need to provide two things: great tools and access to a large audience. We're working on both.'"
I think this site is better to learn XNA:p
/ technicolor-julias.aspx
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.ph
I also like Shawn Hargreaves' Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2006/12/12
I think every game development kit should be applauded if there is a free version of it (like XNA). It can only help talented developers to show their real potential.
How neat of you to mention the distance in metric units in the end, too ;-)
That's slashdotically correct nowadays.
I've looked at the blender environment for making games. However, it has poor network support for multiplayer games (last I checked), and is meant for smaller single person games. DirectX has had a bit better multiplayer support so far, so I imagine XNA has decent multiplayer support, or soon will. Blender is licensed under the GPL, but any scripts and artwork can be under any license you choose, and can be used commercially.
There's also OGRE3D. Although, I've had my share of tracing memory leaks and seg faults enough to know that as a development team of 1, there are much more interesting things I'd rather be doing (like adding content). Given I have been using Java a bit more lately, I've been leaning towards trying to use ogre4j, although progress with this has been relatively slow over the years. (Although their automated conversion of C++ hooks to Java seems interesting.) Also of note, OGRE3D is a graphic engine, not a game framework. However, other game related components exist based on this engine, although each has their own bit of requirements. For example, Yake will not compile without the latest and greatest Visual Studio. (The free Express version won't cut it, because it has dependencies on MFC, which the express version doesn't include.) This solution is the most attractive to me, nonetheless, because games can be made with minimal publishing/license constraints (most are licensed under LGPL).
There are other solutions, such as Garage Games, but they take a huge cut out of any money your game makes (used to be upwards of 80%). They also have mediocre network support, placing them as a poor choice in my opinion. Their claim is that they will, however, handle all of the marketing for your game and get others to play (& pay) for your game. Alternatively, you could pay a $15,000 license per game to remove royalty restrictions. There are also several OpenGL game frameworks, but they require all game releases to be under the GPL.
Does anyone else know of a similar solution that does not require a GPL license for the game, has good multiplayer (or massively multiplayer) network support, and a decent (or active) game development framework?