3d games 101

Honestly I am staying away from 3D until the content pipeline is released. I know I am not the only one that is waiting.

I have seen many XNA projects and I think we as a community have not yet mastered the art of 2D games.

aka_Big_Wurm at 2007-8-31 >

Learn to use a shader based language. The rendering is 100% shader based in XNA I guess this is good in a weird sort of way you don't have to worry about being stuck in yesteryears of 3d game programming.

I'm coming from OpenGL and its a bit odd to not have anything like a quadlist or quadstrip. I suggest reading around on scene mangement and animation basics. Which if you've masterd 2d you should have framed based animation down which will most likely what you'll use.

Also prepared to get creative there seems to be no way to transform things at least not with my playing with it. The way i've done it is looking at the examples with the generic transform shader. Which takes a matrix which you can crate any type of transformation from that and apply it as an effect. Which is a weird way of doing it for me. I'm still playing with multiple effects and such. A very good place to start is their 3d FAQ which tells you how to draw primitives (which are just triangles strung together). Look at spacewars starter kit for model loading though the content pipeline will help you greatly with managing your art assets.

Gamasutra has some neat articles on a postprocessing framework which will give you information on creating those cool post processing effects like bloom, motion blur and other things like. After a bit of practice with this I might put a few tutorials together. This is a very neat framework and poses an interesting challenge to 3d developers.

SeanBryant at 2007-8-31 >