Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creator's Guide

[Saban]

McGraw-Hill: Microsoft XNA Game Studio Creator’s Guide : Book

Got this book for christmas and i've been flipping through it in my free time, its actually quite fascinating and goes into tons of stuff for 3d game programming, like collision detection, animations and buffer indexing.

The only problem is i can't get the source code for examples to load in any version of Visual C#. Says "The project type is not supported by the installation". I tried using VC#9.0s conversion tool and it came up zilch as well.

You can find the source download link on the product page on the left hand side, any suggestions would be appreciated.


Edit: Theres also a new version coming out in April, which will probably address these issues, so if you're also looking at purchasing this book you might want to hold off for now.

[Phelps McManus]

Never used XNA, but doesn't it require some kind of "plug-in" for Visual Studio? They aren't called plug-ins, but it is whatever allows VS to handle Python, F#, and other non-bundled languages.

Try that perhaps?

[Saban]

Have 2.0 and 3.0, neither works =*(

[Saban]

The book says Game Studio Express, which looks to be like 1.0, so i'll try that and see where it gets me.

[Saban]

Success, installing Visual C# Express 2005, Express 2005 SP1 and XNA Game Studio Express and it works, now im drawing primitives like its going out of style.

(technically it wasnt totally successful, i still had to do a project conversion wizard but it actually worked this time)

[Kidriot69]

Is this book suitable for beginners? I just started Python (well, im reading an ebook currently), and i really want to end up working in the gaming industry.

[Saban]

Probably not, if you've never worked with C# at all. I used Microsofts C# for the absolute beginner to get some idea of what i was doing.

But you don't need much experience to get started with this book.

[Phelps McManus]

Best way to learn a language is doing something fun. You will see a lot of stuff you don't understand in the book. Just copy it and get it to work. Then, before you move on, figure out ways to modify it.

It could be something as lame as a radio buttons labeled "Red", "Blue", and "Green" that change the color of the cube they had you make. Maybe you can create an actual selectable palette pop-up. When you get tired of that, then you move on to the next bunch of stuff you don't understand.

Using that strategy got me through a graduate-level computer science course on OpenGL when I was a sophomore (thank God for undergrad grading curves). It was all programmed in C on a Unix (SGI/Cray) graphical supercomputer, neither of which I had ever seen before. So, don't worry if you don't know C# (which is about 10x easier than C/C++).

That was one of my favorite classes. For our final project, me and two other guys made VR Frogger. They had a $25k helmet that could track its position in the room. When you put it on, you saw a 3D mockup of a 4-lane highway with cars and trucks going either direction. You had to run across a few times to "level up" which just added more cars and trucks and increased their speed. It wasn't as much fun to play as it was to build.

edit: Oh and we broke the helmet too. Game requiring fast movement across the room + expensive, fragile helmet = fail.

[Saban]

Yea, this book has recommended exercises at the end of each chapter to try and make you think about what you've made and how to change it so you're not just rewriting all the code out of the book.

[Froofy-D]

I learned by just using the examples on the site. The sample code in the official documentation is very good as well. There's a lot of real simple "Draw A Sprite", "Draw a Triangle" samples. Great for learning.

[Saban]

I might buy the second edition when it comes out, since its adapted for 3.0 and everything.

i'm almost half way through this book, making steady progress.