Elysian Shadows

Hey, just wondering if anyone else who's looked at tutorials for XNA finds the quality of code in the tutorials to be sub-par. It's not that things are poorly presented or explained in videos/text that walks through it, but the code in many of their videos and examples really showed me what spaghetti code is. They have some bits of logic where a method references methods in other classes that reference methods in other classes that reference values in other classes that references a value in the original class, that's dependent upon a method call to another class... and so on.

Basically, if you want to truly understand what's going on you sometimes need to follow a trail of method calls in different classes that reference each other - finally coming full circle back into the class you were initially looking at for some value (and in some cases this goes back and forth multiple times). It makes it frustratingly difficult to understand the game logic they're using so that I can make my own classes, and I hate copying and pasting (especially if I don't fully understand what's going on).

EccentricDuck wrote:Hey, just wondering if anyone else who's looked at tutorials for XNA finds the quality of code in the tutorials to be sub-par. It's not that things are poorly presented or explained in videos/text that walks through it, but the code in many of their videos and examples really showed me what spaghetti code is. They have some bits of logic where a method references methods in other classes that reference methods in other classes that reference values in other classes that references a value in the original class, that's dependent upon a method call to another class... and so on.

Basically, if you want to truly understand what's going on you sometimes need to follow a trail of method calls in different classes that reference each other - finally coming full circle back into the class you were initially looking at for some value (and in some cases this goes back and forth multiple times). It makes it frustratingly difficult to understand the game logic they're using so that I can make my own classes, and I hate copying and pasting (especially if I don't fully understand what's going on).

I've never really noticed that at all, I learned alot from online tutorials when i started with XNA a couple of years ago. I used alot of sites and very rarely found that the code was hard to understand, but i always used text tutorials, never videos. I find that it takes a lot longer and is a lot harder to understand. Also if things are explained well i.e. the concepts behind it, then you should be able to understand the code or at least be able to write your own to do the same thing.

XNA WHA!? YOU'RE BANNED 4 LYFE!!!!

Nah, but forreal. When we were doing our research on the separating axis theorem, we referenced an XNA/C# implementation that we found somewhere on a blog on the web. It wound up being COMPLETELY WRONG, and I personally spent hours rewriting the bastard in C/++ just to find out that they didn't know what they were doing with linear algebra... So yeah, some quality tutorials would definitely be nice to have around these parts. I will add them to the education index.

I must have gotten very lucky with the tutorials i was looking at lol.

MrDeathNote wrote:I must have gotten very lucky with the tutorials i was looking at lol.

I would guess so. Everything I've looked up regarding C#/XNA since we started our CS group project has pretty much been complete garbage. It's very rare that I find anything useful in those tutorials, and when I do it's usually a small snippet of "AHA!" code.

Whew, so it's not just me. MrDeathNote, you must've found some good ones. The ones I've been using primarily have been the actual Microsoft ones, though there's the occasional foray into user made ones. The Microsoft ones are usually terribly convoluted and poorly structured, and everything else pretty much completely lacks any sort of object oriented structure.

XNA WHA!? YOU'RE BANNED 4 LYFE!!!!

You have to admit though, it is a pretty good framework It's no replacement for building your own engine, but for a guy making his first serious attempt at a game going solo I think it does the job really well.

That's my quandary. I'm doing practically everything solo. I'll farm out the artwork and music, but the programming will be all on me. If I was able to get a team together, it might be different, but for now what I have will work.

But, I digress. Much of what I found was very hard to understand as well, especially for someone new to XNA. I would get the gist of what they were doing but tracking down code to modify certain aspects of it were more difficult than they should have been.

I haven't done too much with XNA, but the best XNA tutorials I have been able to find would be RB Whitaker's:
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials

I was never able to find this through a standard google search, I found it while looking up stuff regarding particle systems. So, I hope it can be of use =D

XianForce wrote:I haven't done too much with XNA, but the best XNA tutorials I have been able to find would be RB Whitaker's:
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials

I was never able to find this through a standard google search, I found it while looking up stuff regarding particle systems. So, I hope it can be of use =D

Wow, thanks for the link. I went to take a look at some of his stuff, and it looks really good. I think I'll be using some of those.

Yeah, with how great those tutorials look compared to most of the others I've found, I'm surprised you can't find it within the first few results from searching 'XNA tutorials'.

I had to make sure I bookmarked that link, so I didn't lose it haha