Howdy all.
I’ve been a bit slow on the blog front for the last few days.
Basically gaming too much in the evenings, with a pinch of procrastination mixed in.
In the weekend, I finally got the fancy new XNA stuff installed and started looking at the sample game. Looks real nice, and the plumbing code looks a whole lot tidier than how my code has evolved as I’ve learnt stuff. Helped by the fact that the XNA framework itself looks a lot cleaner than old-school Managed DirectX.
With that in mind, I’m definately going to migrate my code to use the XNA framework next. Pretty easy decision – would be dumb not to really. Besides, it would basically make my game multi platform, Windows and XBOX 360. I was about to refactor and tidy things up anyway.
So I’m back to basics for a bit while I learn how to write for XNA.
There is one catch with me migrating to XNA.
Some of you with older/less fancy hardware (Video card) may have difficulty getting an XNA version working at all. This is because with XNA, microsoft have removed support for something called the “fixed-function pipeline”. I’d never even heard of it until a few days ago (although I was probably using it!). Basically they are looking forward and figuring game development has been moving away from this “fixed-function” thingy for some time. So instead of bloating things with support for old-school stuff, they’re cutting clean and forcing us to do things the new and cool way.
The new way is done entirely with Shaders! Now I don’t know the first thing about Shaders, so I guess there’s another new thing for me to learn.
“How does that effect me?”, I hear you say…
Well basically if your video card doesn’t support Shaders (I think it’s minimum v1.1) then it’ll probably not work at all. :(
Stay tuned for more as I learn more.