BenkoBLOG : XNA

Look who's coming to town!

benko — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:02:01 GMT

Are you game? Are you a gamer? Maybe gaming is your thing, from Pong to Ms. Pacman, from Breakout to Halo. This isn't a deep trip down memory lane but it wasn't that long ago that I wanted to get into computers so I could write my own games...ok, maybe it was that long ago. In any case, it was the allure of computer graphics and gaming that got me started writing code. Of course back then 16K was a lot of memory, the code was basic, and you had to peek and poke the memory to make it do things, but again I digress. Today it is so much easier.

Was it just last year that we released XNA Express? If you're not familiar with XNA, it is the framework for writing XBox games, and as an Express product, you can get it for free from http://msdn.microsoft.com/express. This software is a great way to get

Technorati Tags: XNA , new stuff , User Groups

an awesome head start on writing modern game software. I even did a couple sessions on it at a couple campuses around the US including U of MN, UT Austin, University of Colorado and even Vanderbilt among others.

What is cool is that you don't have to be a student to get started in this stuff. User groups are springing up all over the place and now you can get help and start building out your own games. At a recent code camp in the Twin Cities (thank you Jason Bock and everyone who pulled this off) our XNA MVP Chris Williams gave a knock down presentation on how you can get started with the technology. Better than that, Chris has even gone so far as to create a brand new User Group focused on XNA in the Twin Cities. Their inaugural meeting was tonight (I'm in Austin again so I missed out), and they plan to meet the 3rd Thursday of each month. So if you're like me and missed the first one, come on out & join us at the next. You can get details at http://www.twincitiesxnausergroup.com/!

XNA Demo Stuff

benko — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 16:54:47 GMT

For our campus events we've been showing the new XNA Express tools to create X-Box type games and the such. I found that the environment was very easy to use, and with a little digging into it I'm able to create my own games and have some fun doing it. Thought I'd let you know that i've posted the code for the demo game, and you can download it from my website - www.BenkoTIPS.com and clicking on the downloads menu.

Registered users can get the code examples for this and other webcasts and presentations we've done over the last couple years. Maybe you'll find something you can use?

XNA at University of Texas

benko — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:40:51 GMT

For those who are in Austin and are interested in seeing the latest new cool tool for developers who are into gaming, come on over to University of Texas in Taylor Hall rm 2.124 for a demo of XNA Express. This is Microsoft's free developer tool built on top of C# express for writing XBox games. I gotta say that this is some of the funnest demo's I've done, in that we create a game from scratch and show how you can build your own.

Here are some useful gaming technology and history links that helped me get comfortable with the topic area.

MDX (Managed Direct X) http://www.mdxinfo.com/tutorials/primer.php
Wikipedia articles on directx and direct3d (yes I’d heard of them but didn’t know what they really were)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D
XACT http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/directx9_c/xact_wggt_intro.asp?frame=true
XINPUT http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/directx9_c/dx9_xinput_xinput_dinput.asp?frame=true
Fixed function versus programmable pipeline http://news.com.com/An+inside+look+at+Windows+Vista+-+page+4/2100-1043_3-6051736-4.html?tag=st.num
XBOX Creator’s Club press release http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx

Also, if you launch the DirectX texture tool, you can open up some of the TGA files in the build-from-scratch demo. Can’t find a viewer for the swm file though.