My school was very skeptical towards free stuff. "Naaaaah, we need a product that provides good support" Nevermind that no one ever uses support, and the products that they bought was really crappy and the support sucked.

I am particularly amazed at how schools have a nack for finding the absolutely worst and obscure compressed archive (or watchacallem) programs instead of just throwing in good old winrar or something that everyone's familiar with and never had any problems with. I mean, where the hell do they find those shitty programs?

Besides XNA, OpenGL is good when coupled with other resources. For example, a local guy here his artist friend are making Fringe, which is based off of:

• OpenGL

• OpenSceneGraph (used on top of OpenGL)

• Lua

• RakNet (networking)

They've only been doing that project together for a little while, and since they already have a pretty decent-looking video of the project on that main page, he must be doing something right.

OpenGL (if I remember my sources correctly) has actually been around a lot longer than DirectX... originating back to Unix, IIRC. Win3.x used it a little, and then Windows started making their own implementations of OpenGL that didn't necessarily break OpenGL functionality on their systems, but made it a little more clunky so they could showcase their DirectX (I go this from The OpenGL Bible, 3rd [or 4th?] Edition, so I'll go reference it a little later when I can find a public/school library).

I like DirectX, as almost all Windows versions from Win9X support it, at least partially.

What is your target audience, though? Do you want XBox/XBox-360 consoles only, or do you want to work toward Wii, PlayStation, etc. consoles? For the latter, I'd personally vote for OpenGL because of the ease of porting your projects to them.

If your target is the PC (Windows, Linux) or Mac, OpenGL uses the same commands across those platforms, and relies only on the OpenGL implementation for that target to figure out whether a particular feature can be used or not. In those cases, the vendor for the OS usually tweak OpenGL for the target architecture, if possible, so multiple processors can be most optimally utilized.

That's, of course, just my 2 cents.

I don't care why other people make game for a specific platform.
I use XNA and it's great!

I'm a programmer who wants to get something done, that's why I choose XNA!

Stupidity, indeed. It's a tool like anything else. Use it or don't, but don't pretend you're superior for not using it. I'm sure Microsoft is lamenting the loss, though.

Have you even used the XNA framework?

It's not a "Point N'Click" enviroment. You still have to write logic and drawing code (not all of it, which is the point).

But if you insist on saying that using XNA is not programming then you might as well skip Allegro, Irrlicht, SDL and go for ASM.

In the end though, a game is drawn, not programmed.

Even the job of porting C#/XNA to C++/OpenGL is not as large as producing all the game assets for a major title.

I think this concept has a lot going for it. Forget the Mac stuff for a moment. I think you should think about what this may or may not mean in terms of market share of people who have Pixel Shaders. Maybe the real gamers won't be the largest market for a smaller indie developed 3d game. If you can make it playable on a system that is five years old or a laptop that doesn't have pixel shading acceleration (like my laptop right now which can still do 3d okay) then that might increase market share greatly. I don't think the people with XBox 360 and supercomputer gaming rigs are the sort buying a game from a presumably indie developer who is asking this kind of question. If economics is the major issue here, supporting older computers (as well as Mac) for a simpler 3d game might be a good idea.

I don't think one really needs to ask what is the more important aspect of game developement.. programming and drawing works together, graphics are nothing without programming and programming isn't much without graphics.

It'll be one hell of a job if nobody knows how to do it..

I agree, the main point is of course the game mechanics.
But I feel like I've gained a lot by trying to "reinvent the wheel", I think that control is important.

It isn't?

When I make games I work by myself, and I get to do fun stuff like "game design", but I can imagine that when I work in a team I'll act as a slave who just transforms someones ideas into something a computer can compute, I might invent some cool thing or two, but my guess is that I will not be the one deciding what to invent. (Althought I don't plan to let myself be subject to slavery.)

The only reason I don't accept XNA is beacuse it's a microsoft trap, call it "albin bullshit" or whatever you want but you know as well as I do that XNA isn't charity work.

I believe I was talking about why I don't like XNA.

And then I argumentet about why I won't accept XNA.

Hmm.. I find programming to be rather repetive.

I guess I'm just not doing the big stuff yet.

But with tools like XNA you can instantly focus on gameplay. You don't need to solve technical issues about how to setup window, how to draw bitmap onto the screen etc.

I'll probably use it for prototyping. Anyway everybody has a choice. Pros of XNA are XBOX support and availability (easy to use). Cons are that you probably cut out potential targets.

I think that if anyone is using straight-to-Win32 API code and is rewriting the code to open a window, load some graphics, etc every time they start a project then they probably deserve all the hassle they get.

XNA is, as the thread topic says, mostly just a library you can use for making games (albeit one that is closely tied to a newish groups of languages). OGRE, OpenGL, SDL, Allegro, OpenSceneGraph and others are all alternative libraries at different levels of abstraction. Picking a library that doesn't abstract to the layer you want doesn't mean you have to repeatedly write new abstractions.

Since this has turned into an XNA versus anything-other-than-XNA discussion, how about we do some real examples? Maybe some people who know XNA could give some examples of areas in which it is really beneficial, and people who prefer other things can show how they achieve the same thing?

I'm not saying that the ethical issues of tying yourself to Microsoft are unimportant, just that I think we've fully explored them now.