I had to send my laptop into Dell again for repairs since they screwed up the initial repair so I spent some mess around time on non-beatbox, non-holdem related stuff.

So I downloaded XNA framework and so far I’m really happy with how things are setup. The API is really solid and easy to use. I had everything downloaded, installed and a spinning cube with 360 controller support in about 3 hours. Some things I like a lot and are worth mentioning:

  • 360 controller support is awesome, no remapping wierd DINPUT Z-trigger or hats to in game actions. The game pad state that you read has members like Triggers.Left which is a floating point value. You can easily do things like Buttons.A == ButtonState.Pressed.
  • The Matrix object is very easy to use and has a bunch of very helpful static methods for getting various types of matrices.
  • C# is pretty fun to write game code in.
  • The framework is nice and lean and does things ‘The Right Way’, they don’t eat all your CPU when you’re running a basic idle loop or in the background.
  • All the heavy lifting is done in shaders via .fx files. This is very handy and works well with the VertexBuffer classes.

I couldn’t get stuff to work initially on WinXP 64bit edition until I found this post

I’ll probably post some screenshots before I go back to regular stuff. I don’t know how far down the XNA path I’m willing to go just yet.