Jacob Repp

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.

Related posts:

• RubyCube is almost ready for release
• RubyCube progress
• XNA Rainbow Mesh

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