Blog of Ortz

I’ve been collecting XNA videos on Youtube into a playlist for a while now. Check it out. I’ve got about 40 videos as of this posting.

If you have a video you would like me to add, feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

I also idle in #xna on EFNet. If you have a video you would like added, feel free to PM me. I’ll add it when I’m around.

Got my hard drive on Monday, so by now I’m pretty settled in. I know it sounds like I’m moving to a new house or something, but for the past two weeks I’ve been using Linux on my server, and I’ve felt like I’ve had a bag over my head. This is absolutely nothing against Linux, I suppose it’s just the effect of being in a different environment. It’s really hard to get things done with this sort of feeling. It’s a bit like jet lag I guess.

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I have a simple question about XNA tutorials. Why is everyone sparing newbies OO? Nearly every article and tutorial I see uses very little, if any, Object Orientation. They’re going to have to learn it anyway. In fact, game programming in XNA is a perfect opportunity to learn it.

Yes, they’re new, but you don’t need to dumb things down. XNA has already been simplified. That is, in fact, what XNA is all about. Because XNA has already made it easier, I think we need to concentrate on making the newbies good programmers instead of making it even easier for them to program. I can understand making the most basic “putting a sprite on the screen” tutorials as simple as possible to just get them started, but in order for them to really take off and get to the point where they no longer rely on tutorials, they HAVE to learn OOP.

Articles need to have OOP. This is even more confusing to me. Even the more advanced articles contain little OOP. Is this just how people program? Maybe it’s just me. When I program, I am obsessed with making everything as OO as possible.

Maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong tutorials. If I am, tell me.

So for the past few weeks, shortly after jumping into C#, I’ve been messing around with XNA. I haven’t had this much fun programming since I first discovered how to query a MySQL database with PHP.

Instead of going on some big thing about what XNA is, I’ll link you here.

After I made a simple Pong game and it was boring, I started on an Asteroids game. Then I was reminded that I didn’t like playing Asteroids clones so it wouldn’t make much sense to make one.

So now, I’m working on something else. I’m not sure if I want to tell anyone what it is yet, since certain people will fap over it and compare it to something and flame me when it doesn’t meet their expectations. I will tell you that it involves the Farseer Physics Engine. It’s pretty new and undocumented but it will end up being the core of my game. I haven’t been working on it much lately because of schoolwork. Maybe I’ll post something on it later so people can motivate me.