Elysian Shadows

All these features are possible thanks to a magic piece of software called XNA, which stands – cunningly enough – for XNA's Not Acronymed. XNA is a very thin piece of programming created by Microsoft, and it sits directly on top of DirectX. If you've ever tried to program with DirectX before, you'll know that it's an absolute nightmare… But XNA is different.

XNA is a very thin piece of programming created by Microsoft

Microsoft acts as your publisher and gives you a 70 per cent cut of all the money your game makes.

4. As a Microsoft MVP in the XNA category (and tech editor for an XNA book), I can wholeheartedly say that this is one of the worst articles ever written on the subject. While XNA game studio does try to smooth out the steep learning curve of games programming, it is by no means does it "make it easy to drop in all the features that people want in modern games".

Not getting into the fact that a lot of code you'll find online is not free to just steal and use (a lot of it is licensed and you are bound by those terms if you are using their code), this is a terrible excuse for an introduction into game development. I don't think people need degrees or tons of money to make games, but they do need a level headed idea of what's involved.

Making games isn't easy; it's not excruciatingly hard, either, but it isn't just some drag-and-drop process. Do you think Halo was made by Bungie just stealing code off the internet? Of course not. They have intelligent programmers who know how it all works.

It sounds like this author is someone who wanted to learn programming, got angry when told how hard it was, and decided that pasting together asteroids clones qualifies him to teach programming and bash hard-working programmers. Honestly, I pray this is some sort of subversive joke that I didn't get, because if TechRadar honestly thinks this is a quality introduction to XNA, they need to get some things adjusted.

While the concept of this article may have been well-intentioned, it's execution definitely does more harm than good. What's worse is the original publication in PC Format.

Full response:

http://benkane.wordpress.com/2009/01/29 ... -not-easy/

2. Listen carefully, for we shall say this only once: The author of this mishmash of bad information, bad practices, and downright insulting piece of trash is at best misinformed and at worst needs to find himself another job.

From your "don't read books" to your "this is easy", it's clear to me that you have never spent more than five minutes furtively copy and pasting code from one google search into your IDE. Advise like what this column proscribes yields the infinite piles of schlock on the internet at large.

Programming is /hard/. That's why people go to school for it. Games programming is /harder/, because not only do you have to 'make a game', but you have to coordinate resources: sound, music, textures, models or sprites. A story. And no, you can't just solve your resource problems with google. Someone has to either really like your project, or get paid. Then, add some controls. And at the end of the day, it has to be fun!

Without the books, the best practices of people who have been doing this for years is lost. What happens when you have too many things on the screen to collide against, and your game runs too slow. Well, according to you, that's not a problem, and definitely can't be solved by reading books. How the hell are you supposed to understand abstract data structures, like a quadtree, from a clipboard?

Stick to what you're marginal at, writing, and let the real men (and women) make games.

This article is a good idea, though this part made me lol :

"We get asked this question a lot: 'What's the best way to start programming?' Some people like to buy books. Some people like to get a computer games programming degree. But they are – and we don't want to put too fine a point on this – stupid.

You don't read books if you want to learn to ride a bike. You don't need a degree to play GTA4 (although it might take one to get the damn thing working). So if you think programming is different, you're wrong: the best way to learn to code is to just to dive in. Steal code from other people. Copy and paste stuff, then edit it a little to get what you want. Try things out, because if they don't work you've lost nothing."

I love it when writers actually get something like this published

To be fair right, most people would describe me as kind of brainy. I don't mean that to sound arrogant but the reason I say that is because I've been programming games since I was 13, and now work for one of the top game development studios in Europe making games for all the leading console platforms including PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

The reason people don't read books to ride a bike is because even a child can ride a bike. It would probably even be possible to train a monkey to ride a bike and play GTA4, possibly at the same time. However, the difference between those activities and writing computer games, is that one of them requires an advanced knowledge of software engineering, and the others do not. This is why stupid people make games that are - without putting too fine an edge on it - pants, and those that can read without the aid of pretty pictures tend towards learning the necessary knowledge to make games that are not pants; Which inevitably entails going to university, earning a good 2:1 degree (or better), reading lots of books and staying in. A lot.

I don't dispute that you can, technically speaking, cobble a game together in C# using a hodge podge of code snippets borrowed (with permission of couse) from people who know what they're doing. After all, it's fun! I myself started this very same way. However, drawing from that experience, I just think the new generation of game developers should realise that there is more to it, and it is no way shameful to recognise the fact that making games is, in fact, ludicruously difficult! You can go a long way on a small bit of knowledge, so dive in and have fun

aamesxdavid wrote: For more examples of poor delusional souls, and some laughs, feel free to visit: http://home.moonrisingame.com/

Oh, the stories I have about the guy who runs that site...