My zune just updated to 3.0 (didn't even realize they were releasing something new!) and the update came with two games, but the Zune marketplace does not have games.
Where do I go to get started, and what are the capabilities of the Zune in terms of games/apps?
Well, first, you must download the Microsoft XNA 3.0 CTP. Read the documentation, which will explain the capabilities. But, from memory:
No hardware accelerated 3d (obviously, you can create a software 3d engine and then render the result to a 2d sprite, but... Don't expect much in terms of performance ;))
No XACT, you must use a new sound API
Just an update but note that XNA 3.0 has been released. It requires some flavor of Visual Studio 2008.
I downloaded it and coded & deployed "hello world" to my Zune in no time at all. Very easy.
You should check out the blog of Rob Miles. He has a few chapters of his book on his site. Great place to start.
I was hoping someone here would have better resources, but as this seems to be a new area of development, here's one resource that appears to give all the steps for a newbie to get started (too many assume you already have Visual studio, etc).
I'm really interested in a better in-depth overview of the capabilities as well, though.
-Adam
Related
I am not very familiar with Game engines for iOS app. Can anyone suggest an open source game engine for my game development?
My game scenario is as follows: The user selects a map, and a character inside of the game I moves through a path predefined in the map.
I was thinking about writing this game in OpenGL but it seems like I have to write a huge amount of code. Do any game engines exist in which I can successfully write this game?
Lua is easier to learn than Objective-C. There are several Lua development environments:
Gideros Studio: http://www.giderosmobile.com/
Corona SDK: http://www.coronalabs.com/
Moai: http://getmoai.com/
My favourite is Gideros Studio, because it seemed to me the easiest to get started, and is free until you want to remove the splash screen, and has a very friendly forum with access to the developers. You can also include native plugins (Objective C and C++ for Android).
Moai is the only actual open source one, if you really need to change the source, but it is probably the hardest one to learn.
cocos2d is popular and easy to use and learn. you could also use kobald2d as that includes cocos2d and other frameworks as well. you can download them through a search on google
As state by the other user cocos2d would be a good solution for what you want. Although you asked for "open source", you can always check, for free, Unity for iOS. You could also check a question I made some time ago, which can give you some hints of some options you have, here. From the Unity site:
Oh, and don't forget that Unity is free and we have fully-functional
30-day trials available for Unity Pro and Unity iOS Pro!
I know it's not perfect, but still, if you see it's worth, it can make a huge difference in your project.
Try Stencyl, it's not free, but it is a good engine that doesnt require a lot of code
I would like to have a go at making some simple games for personal/learning purposes. By simple games I mean games like platform, maze, arcade games for example. I would also one day like to create a platform game with a simple editor to allow others to edit and design their own game levels.
I am not sure if Delphi is the way to go though, I don't see or hear many people writing games in Delphi, but Delphi is the only language I understand on an intermediate level.
If Delphi is acceptable to create simple games as I mentioned, am I right in thinking that I would require some libraries that would help me do this, maybe Direct X for example?
I am using Delphi XE, I wish I had waited and upgraded to Delphi XE2 instead as it seems that includes some built in Drawing libraries.
I look forward to hearing your responses on this.
Thanks.
Check out Asphyre
And to encourage you; Soldat, C-evo and many more quality games were built with Delphi, Game Maker too.
There are to many options ...
If you are really new to this take a look at this site and get some good examples from children that try to make games Pascal programming for schools ...
If you are one level up here some library's that give you the a great start for small and big games... this is for new and very advance pascal programming...
GLScene just get the svn version... (Windows,MacOsX,Linux and hear for android and iphone ;) ) -- 2D,3D,isometric........
CastII Great engine (Windows,MacOsX,Linux) -- Mostly 3D....
Asphyre Sphinx 2 One of my favorite i allready start a big big game with that library... NOW (Windows32-64,MacOsX,Linux,and IOS) with DelphiXE2
ZenGL Fantastic and quite easy to use (Windows,Linux,MacOsX and i hear android too) --Mostly 2D but i hear 3D is in way out...
Castle Great library for me not to easy... (Windows,Linux,MacOsX) compine great with freepascal and lazarus...
Andorra 2d This is going to be the best but suddenly stops ... 2d programming at its best...
there are many other libraries and i here a few of them come out before the new year...
But if you go deeper you can try the hard way... the headers so ...
for opengl use the header from here delphigl
for SDL use the Jedi-SDL header (great by the way)...
for directX use the clootie and good luck...
But the most important thing in the game programming is the paper...
Every think write in the paper is the most value object in object programming...
Hope that helps...
Delphi is great for games! Here is a very good resource to get you started: http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/
It has a friendly forum where you can ask questions.
I have personally used Delphi for graphics programming for many years and written a free open source game engine in Delphi called ZGameEditor.
azrael11
GLScene doesn't support Android(work in progress as I know)
Cast II works only on Windows
Asphyre Sphinx 2 doesn't support Linux
ZenGL supports also iOS. Android - work in progress. 3D - I'm not interested in it currently, so only fast 2D is main goal.
I have started working on Corona SDK.As you all know it uses Lua as the programming language,i wanted to know some good links or ebooks which i can refer to begin development.I am an iPhone developer and working on objective C since last 1 year.
Any suggestions,help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Aditya
I've been using this: Programming in Lua, first edition (FREE online edition of the book)
The Corona SDK forums are also good for specific issues related to the SDk itself. It seems it is having a few database problems just right now, but you might want to check it later.
Edit: just for completeness, here is the link to the Lua Bookstore # amazon (not an affiliate link).
You can also check out http://learningcorona.com/ which has a huge listing of tutorials for Corona.
Here's a great resource for learning Lua, it's aimed towards beginner programmers (doesn't sound like you), but it does a great job at introducing Lua and most of the basic concepts:
Lua for Beginners:
http://lua.gts-stolberg.de/en/index.php?uml=1
That, as well as the "Learning Corona" section of the Ansca docs should be plenty enough to get you up to speed in a very short amount of time:
http://developer.anscamobile.com/resources/docs/
TIP: Start working on a project, or converting an existing app using Corona and you'll learn it blazing fast! That's what I did, and I learned it quickly enough to have one of my games fully converted in about 8 days.
For understanding basics of CORONA SDK I will prefer "Corona.SDK.Mobile.Game.Development.Beginners.Guide"
book from Packtpub publication.
and You can also check out http://www.learningcorona.com/ for tutorial both video and audio.
The Lua Reference Manual is also an excellent read: Concise and complete.
Lua Gems is also worth looking at (at least the freely available snippets).
I found the Beginning Lua Programming book to be pretty good as a complete reference for Lua with good example code.
My very personal advice is just take a look at great books (Programming in LUA is covering everything) and switch as soon as possibles to samples / tutorials in order to learn all the API functions.
There are several Corona sdk video tutorials on YouTube. One demonstrates how to create a simple balloon game in a few minutes. You can have Your Lua editor in one window and YouTube in another, and click on the video to start/stop and switch to the editor and type in the code. Some tutorials provide links to download the code.
hello you can use their website they have good documentation you will find it here
http://docs.coronalabs.com/api/
I am going to look into XNA But i dont know where to start. What book will you recomand? is there a site with tutorials of some kind?
Well, the official site has plenty tutorials and samples:
Education Catalog (samples, etc...)
And there is the Getting Started section:
Getting Started
I've found that the Riemers tutorial is pretty helpful, at least to give you a decent starting foundation.
The XNA Dev Center is the place to go:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa937791.aspx
If you are making a simple 2d game, I'd recommend checking out the Flat Red Ball engine. It's a fantastic 2d engine with XBOX, PC, Windows Phone, and Silverlight compatibility. They have fantastic support. It's free. (No, I do not have any affiliation with FRB, have just been using their engine for over a year.)
XNA is a great platform, but not an engine. The XNA tutorials are great, but do not fit into an object-component model like FRB does.
It's gotta be free. It's hobby, after all, not a business!. Creating for-profit software isn't an issue, but anything that requires a hardware mod is out.
Nope, I don't think so. The only other .NET environment for consoles I know costs money and is called unity3d: http://unity3d.com/
I think it supports the iPhone and the Wii and uses Mono as runtime environment. 200 bucks and you are in :)
No, all of the major consoles, except for the Xbox 360, do not have open development environments. There are various homebrew kits you can get, but these aren't sanctioned by the console makers (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft), so at best, you'll only be able to give away ROMs of what you make for free. If you try to sell anything, you'll get sued into the ground.
As Adam said, homebrew is pretty much the only way to do what it sounds like you want to do. A lot of times, using homebrew kits also involves modifying the console in some manner.
There is a Linux-based portable game device called the GP2X that might interest you, but I think that open source game development (or at least game development using open source tools) is more of a PC thing.
If you are a student at an accredited university, you can get a free 12-month trial subscription to the XNA Creator's Club through the Dreamspark site.
Free and official? No. And XNA isn't free in the respect that you have to pay $99 to use it on the 360.
You're pretty much limited to hacked, homebrew development, coupled with hardware modification. There's at least one console out there where the hardware modification is not required but I'm not sure if we can talk about it.
On a historical note, Sony released something in Japan called Yarouze on the PSX which had a similar situation to the XNA Creators Club on the 360 (paid kit, only for hobbyists) but it never came to the USA.
Not as widely documented and supported as XNA, but here are some libraries with documentation/wiki's for the handheld consoles.
GameBoy Advance: HAM
Nintendo DS: PAlib, devkitPro (the basis for pretty much all homebrew on the DS)
You may still be able to find a "PS2 Linux" kit available - but the games you make there will only run on other instances of PS2 Linux - a limited audience.
It depends what you classifies as a console. The iPod Touch and the iPhone has got the iPhone SDK with which it should be possible to develop quite good games and when you're done they can easily be distributed through App Store either fer free or for a price of which you will be given 70%.
as bhinks mentioned, there's the GP2X, but has been around for a bit, and there's a huge community of homebrew game developers for it. the GP2X has now ceased production, and it has 2 successors on the way, the WIZ by the same company, Game Park and the Pandora which is a proper enthusiast device.
the beauty is you can do games in SDL and build for all devices, including the PC
Just pay your $200 for the Unity3D indie license and you can create games for Pc, Mac, the browser, iPhone and Wii. It's arguably a more powerful enigne than XNA because it has built-in collision detection, physics etc