Hello, XNA

So I've been writing tools in C# for building games for almost two years now, but I've not really attempted to write a game there yet. I had a brief flirt with MDX for the novelty of it, but without being able to use it at work I just haven't been able to find the time. A bit of time to myself and the launch of XNA though, has prompted me to finally investigate.

Turns out, XNA is wonderful.

To start with what I know: C# is ace. It's a reasonably clean language that in the MS implementation comes with a great set of libraries (.Net). It's easy to learn, easy to read and easy to debug. Not to mention the built in honest to goodness reflection. Man, does that come in handy.

What a joy to find that a good chunk of that stuff shows up in the XNA Framework as well. For the uninitiated, the XNA Framework (based, as I understand it, on the Compact Framework) is the cut down version of the full .Net libraries designed to run on both Windows and the XBox 360. The plan is that if you stick to these bits, you should be able to run your game on the 360 with just a recompile. If you're resolutely windows bound though, you're free to additionally use any other libraries that strike your fancy.

Getting into the actual game libs, XNA provides runtime managed wrappers for DirectX graphics, input handling, audio playback, and some other miscellaneous bits and bobs. My experience so far with the graphics portion has been sublime. Not only is it laid out in a wonderfully clean and concise manner, but the performance hasn't been shabby at all. Given the overall advantages of working in managed code, I can happily see developing a game this way.

Offline, XNA also provides a content pipeline for organising your data builds. Constructed as a Visual Studio plugin, the content pipeline does the usual dependency checked source to binary platform target conversions. The system is designed to take plugins for each conversion type, and comes with standard converters for .x, .fbx, model files .fx effect files and a brace of standard image files. These default plugins worked well enough, and I had practically plug and play data out of 3D Studio Max in no time.

There's plenty still missing, but if this is version 1 then I'm happy to invest the belief that it'll come eventually. Following is my initial laundry list of missing XNA bits and bobs:

• Animation. Preferably built in such a way that makes animation compatible with but not limited to models. Reasoning for this is that data over time can be rather useful for any number of things besides moving an articulated skeleton of bones. A channel based architecture, I'd wager, would be appropriate. Bonus points for supporting some generic form of triggering data as well, e.g. sound triggers.
  
• Game Structure. The current Game class takes away a lot of the tedium associated with starting up a robust directX window (actually, amazingly so. Hello XNA World is an astonishingly small amount of code), but it doesn't really point much in the way of game structure. It would be nice to see, if only as good practice examples, modules from Microsoft for graphics scenes/contexts, state machines, etc.
• UI. There are only so many ways to build the back end code for a UI system. I know, I've written a few myself. I've yet to see any really compelling reasons to pick one over the other, and frankly if any of them were available off the shelf I'd jump at using it. Microsoft have already built the great Forms system for Windows programming, I'd love to see them apply some magic to game UIs.
  
• Online Support. Nothing in the XNA about playing online yet.

So week one of the XNA and I'm quite happy that I've spent the time on it. To be honest, I don't think that this'll take the dev world by storm just yet. Many of the advantages XNA offers we already have, the content pipeline in particular. What dev house doesn't have one? Writing in C# at the moment is also a no go for anything but the Windows platform. Even for the 360, we have to wait until the middle of next year for the professional version of XNA to surface.

No, I think where XNA really lives, for us devs anyway, is in promises for the future. If Microsoft can demonstrate that they're in it for the long haul, then they might win over the more staid among us when it's time to upgrade from our current setups.

Then perhaps I'll finally get to write some runtime managed code!