Building killer Games using .NET and XNA Game Studio Express

In case you missed it, Microsoft shipped XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 last week.  XNA provides a rich .NET based framework for building games, and supports development using C# and Visual Studio.  The games you build with it can then be run on both Windows clients, and XBOX 360 consoles.  

XNA relies on a version of the .NET Compact Framework CLR that we ported to run on PowerPC chips (the XBOX 360 ships with a 3-core PowerPC CPU).  For a killer demo that will impress your friends, install XNA Express, load up the built-in "SpaceWar" C# starter kit template, customize it, deploy it to the XBOX 360, run it and dazzle them with the graphics, and then set a breakpoint within your C# code in Visual Studio and show hitting the breakpoint and stepping through it in a live debug session against the XBOX 360 as you are playing the game.  Pretty cool.

You can download XNA for free, and learn more about it on the MSDN XNA web-site.  Included on the MSDN XNA site are a number of nice Channel9 videos that you can watch here to quickly get up to speed on the project.  I also found the www.xnadevelopment.com site very useful (it contains a number of good step-by-step getting started tutorials - like this one).

If you are looking to have some fun this holiday season, try writing a cool game using .NET.

Hope this helps,

Scott

19 Comments

  • Wow
    This looks a cool stuff when u want to try ur hand for something new

  • Let me know when you have VB.NET support and I'll take a look. Is there a way you can hack VB support into this right now by messing with the build rules? It's all IL at the end of the day...

    The last time I touched C/C++ was when I left the video games biz 8 years ago, and I've never looked back. We spent so much of our time tracking memory leaks and dodgy pointers. Huge amount of wasted effort. Managed code is the future of video games.

    Having coded in C/C++ for 16 years, C# just reminds me of everything that is bad about C. C# just gets in the way of actually doing some coding with its ceaseless pedantry.

  • Hi Boris,

    VB support with XNA will be coming in the near future. I believe it is already supported at runtime - it is just tooling support that is still being worked on.

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • What is the name of the game in the picture? Thanks.

  • As it stands right now I have to have Visual Studio and Visual C# EE installed to use XNA. Are there plans to have it use VS OR VC# EE instead of requiring Visaul C#?

  • Looking forward to when VB support will be added. Also wondering, it seems that it will handle 3D game development but what out TBS (turn-based strategy).
    David.

  • Hi Justyn,

    I believe the plan in the spring is to not require Visual C# Express to be installed - and allow any VS Standard or PRO SKU to be the only thing on the system.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • Hi Johnny,

    Unfortunately I'm not actually sure what game the picture is from. I just saw it on some XNA sample site and thought it was cool, and so included it in my post. :-)

    Thanks,

    Scott

  • This looks very cool. I'm happy to see Microsoft release something like this that will allow me to leverage my existing skills as a C# developer to do something fun.

  • The picture is from Halo 3

  • Scott (and the entire XNA guys),

    It's great that MS has put this out and it's the right step forward but it misses out on a lot of fronts:
    1. No live support. I heard it's coming later though
    2. Requires VS Express. Which bugs me because I already have Team Suite installed, the cadillac of tools yet to build stuff I need a Yugo. Yes, I saw you mentioned it was in the plan for later release.
    3. Requires a subscription for playing on XBox. Okay, obviously someone has to make money from this but the subscription is flawed coming out of the gate. I have to pay $99/year to play other peoples games, but I also have to pay just to run my own. Not sure how I feel about that.
    4. The recipient of my games (assuming they a subscription) requires VS express and has to run my game (code and all) from their PC or something (maybe I'm not understanding it fully) so I can't simply give them a CD to run. This is great for giving it to my gaming buddy as long as he's shelled out the $99 fee but generally sucks in many ways.

    Sorry, I'm not bashing you, you're just the messenger but I figure it's Tuesday and I have to rant somewhere about something.

    I do look forward to future releases of the framework and tools though and encourage anyone who hasn't done any game programming to check it out!

  • Hi Bill,

    The Express edition of the XNA Game Studio (which is free) does require that you have VS Express and that the user has VS Express on their machine to run the games you are building. The Professional edition of XNA won't have this restriction and will allow developers to build commercial deployment versions that don't require this.

    The requirement to have C# Express will go away in the future. I believe Live networking support will also be coming online in the future (crawl, walk, run...).

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • This is so cool ! In the past I used PS2 linux Kit from Sony for my PS2 Development, but this Ps2 Kit is hard to learn. Now I can use C# to development game. Great !

  • Wouldn't you be able to do everything required with the Xbox Silver Live account and therefore not have to shell out for the $99 fee?

  • +1 on on not requiring C# Express... makes those of us that paid big bucks for the whole Team Suite edition feel shunned.

    Yes, I am aware it's coming... but I just want to add my vote for how important this is. I'll be back when I don't have to sully my machine.

  • It's funny watching people complain about essentially free software.

  • All of the items people have complained about are coming. But no they all will not be free.

    Requiring $99 to hook up your Xbox. Well come on, they had to build an infrastructure to support this. The Xbox 360 is a closed platform and they had to think very carefully how to get this capability on there through the dashboard, and then they support it.

    For now that's all you get. To play someone else's game they have to ship you the code and assets. However, from the sounds of other XNA team members, they don't want to stop there. They want to create a community of shared games. I expect that will come, and it will be part of your subscription.

    As for requiring C#, well, that's a fair complaint. It's also the first release.

    As for whether it will support turn based games. Well, you're talking game implementation now, not what it supports. It has a pretty good 2D library (something that has been lacking since DirectX 7, and that left hobbyists out in the cold) and then of course 3D support. So make your turn based game 2D or 3D... your choice.

    Live support is said to be in XNA Professional. So it looks like, for now, you'll have to pony up to get on board with Live support. Honestly, this makes a lot of sense, but maybe if the community arcade really takes off, they'll just open it up to everyone. I think the final decision hasn't been made here.

  • I too eagerly await VB support.

  • I still fail to see why hardcore VB.NET programmers have such an issue with C# when the primary differences are syntactical.

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