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Closed 9 years ago.
I've been considering experimenting with game development and XNA. I'm already an expert C/C++ programmer. I read through some C# books, but haven't done any development in C# yet.
What's a good resource for learning XNA, from the point of view of someone who's already an expert programmer?
I'll second reimers and the creators.xna.com samples as a good way to get a handle on how to quickly whip things up.
On the other side of the spectrum, I highly recommend Nick Gravelyn's Tile Engine tutorials. It's a different approach, as the entire series is presented in video. It seems like a great place for beginners to get started, though new coders might have a bit of trouble with his pace. Having said that, the section on the Content Pipeline (which is an XNA-specific implementation of the pipeline concept) is a good introduction.
Ziggyware also has a good selection of tutorials, some of which are more advanced.
Shawn Hargreaves, one of the XNA's devs, has a great blog that let's you in on the internals of XNA a little more. Check out the archive if there's a topic that interests you in particular.
This is good: http://www.riemers.net/, just keep in mind that navigation is through the bar on the right. I must have been tired because it took me a while to figure it out :-O
Check out the XNA homepage and the tutorials over there, under Community -> Resources. As an experienced programmer you should be able to take it from there.
For more in-depth infos browse the XNA Team's blogs, also linked from the XNA Creators page.
I would say that a library called XNA Debug Terminal should be of some help to you. It is open source and can be setup in seconds. It allows you to see the value of any variable, invoke any method, watch values changing in real-time, and more by simply typing c# code into a terminal-like display that appears atop your game window. Unlike the normal Visual Studio debugger, you can invoke arbitrary code while your game is running. You can find out more about this at http://www.protohacks.net/xna_debug_terminal . This will greatly help you to avoid a lot of frustration while learning XNA.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm a college student trying to make a web community with friends. Although we are not experienced developers by any means, we have taken courses on JAVA and some web programming languages (PHP, JAVASCRIPT, CSS, HTML).
At this point, we need to decide on a web framework and begin learning. I have narrowed down my list to Ruby on Rails and Codeigniter, but I am really not sure why I should pick one over the other.
Thanks in advance.
Pick the one you want to learn and go with it.
I will personally recommend Rails because:
it teaches you a lot of best practices if you do things the Rails Way™
Ruby is a fun, easy-to-learn, expressive language
the community is really big, enthusiastic, and very helpful
there's great books and tutorials available all over the internet
There is nothing like the good framework. It highly depends on, in no particular order :
your skills
your tastes (Yes, it does matter a lot)
your willingness to learn
technical constraints. Your hosting company may support only Ruby or only PHP
...
I personally had the occasion to develop with CodeIgniter and I pretty much enjoyed it. It is light, well documented and leaves you with a lot of freedom.
I also have a good friend for whom Ruby On Rails is the only framework deserving the name of "framework".
If your project is ambitious, a good idea to make your point could be to make a trivial application like a TODO list with both framework and then pick the one that fits your need.
Hope this helps.
If there is no time constraint (as you need to learn both ruby lang and rails framework) and want to know the best practices, i would recommend RubyonRails.
If you have time constraint, then go ahead with Codeigniter. It is easy to learn and well documented.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm an intermediate iOS developer with a couple apps on the store with decent results, but I have an idea for a game. I even have some pretty spectacular ideas in mind for monetizing this game.
My problem is I don't know the first thing about OpenGL -- I'm reading the documentation and watching some videos, but that's a deep rabbit hole.
My question is: Am I better off rolling my own 3d engine, or using the SDKs already out there -- Unity, namely -- and how different should I expect those approaches to be?
Thanks!
If you're making a game, you're almost never better off rolling your own renderer. Not unless there's something special about your game rendering that you need to do that engines cannot accomplish.
Oh, and we have a site for game development questions.
While making a game, if you actually want to learn something then you should go for your own 3d engine.
If you go for others engine then yes, may be you will face less difficulties but at the same time you have to go according to their boundaries and limitations.
And OpenGL ES is an API used for rendering and graphics purposes.You need to learn OPenGL ES not whole OpenGL api. Its well documentation is available out there.
here's a [link] http://www.khronos.org/opengles/
I agree with Nicol. Your time and effort is probably better spent developing the game rather than developing, yet another, '3D engine'.
Take a look at the Unity tutorials. They'll give you an idea of the development process.
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/
and how different should I expect those approaches to be?
Unity development is very different from OpenGL development. Unity is closer to an authoring environment.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm picking up jQuery and jQuery UI and I would like some suggestions on some practice exercises for learning the libraries.
I'm particularly interested in Ajax and anything that might be a little bit .net centric.
I acknowledge that the jQuery web site has lots of simple examples showing how to use all the individual function calls, but I'm interested in seeing how they work with more practical examples.
Games are always fun. I wrote a chess game to learn jQuery AJAX programming, which was complicated but cool. If you're looking for something simpler, perhaps Tic-Tac-Toe would be a good choice.
Rading jquery official documentation, tutorials as well as deploying your own code, just start low and go slow, after all the bugs and doubts, tons of google searches and SO browsing you will be a guru. I think it is the best way, probably not the most productive. As someone said: the expert is one who had a lot of errors on the way and learnt from them.
So start coding now!
If you want ajax: search for getJSON() function first, I think it is the best step to start learing client-server interaction.
PS: also some good javascript book is also good for you, whiule jquery allow a big deal of abstraction it is still based on javascript.
If you still want some links, here you go:
Getting started with jquery
Jquery for beginners
A good way to pickup jQuery and AJAX is to just build websites. Setup a local web server with MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP and just start building / designing whatever kind of pages you want to.
If you're short on design inspiration, try to reverse engineer existing websites / web apps without looking at source code.
Something simple I used to do with dynamic code generation was to make an etch-a-sketch type page..
Make an X by X grid of pixel-like blocks, and give them all a hover effect of changing their color.. maybe change it each time it's hovered to something else.. play around with that concept a bit and add enhancements and features..
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am working as a PhD student developing scientific/engineering simulations and algorithms to be tested in these simulations. These days the first student started to work on my project (for his Bachelor thesis) and I am wondering: how should I organize the project now?
I think I have some good C++ knowledge (although I still want to improve every day) and the code contains some design patterns, lots of templated classes etc. These techniques are new to the student and I wonder if it's a good idea to have him work directly in the trunk of the project.
Do you have any experiences what happens if programming newbies and more experienced programmers are mixed? Does the code get messed up or do the newbies learn more by this? Is it wise to have a branch for the student to test his algorithms and maybe merge them into the trunk later? Should I first give him a book like The Pragmatic Programmer for reading (better suggestions?)?
Constant code reviews are an excellent way of a) improving the quality of committed code and b) helping the newer programmers get up to speed, integrate and rapidly learn.
We use code reviews and it really does help in so many ways.
Edit: Another advantage of code reviews is that it gives people a chance to describe why they did something the way they did - code reviews are a two-way process, and both parties can benefit from them. Remember, jsut because they're new, doesn't mean they don't have something to teach you.
So long as the students understand that code reviews are a well-accepted industry practice with no small amount of research backing it up, that it isn't intended to babysit newcomers, and that even experienced programmers use code reviews, it should work out fine.
If it helps, have them take part code reviews of more experienced programmers.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I started playing around with Pascal Script today and I cannot find any good documentation. I found these (one, two) articles. The are helpful but they are just examples.
edit: Separated this into two questions. New question is here.
I don't know if this will help but last week, I started working with FastScript. The first kinds of errors I ran into were the same as what you are seeing. After studying the slightly helpful documentation and the much more helpful code, I saw that I needed to add a constructor for a class by using an AddConstructor call and any other methods of a class with a call to AddMethod. I'm getting a better idea of just how their parsing works and it looks like I can assemble a reference to an arbitrarily complex class just by mirroring it with a series of calls to AddMethod, AddProperty, AddIndexProperty and so on. Just like in Pascal, you start first by defining the simpler class and then use that simpler class in your more complex class.
Thinking about it over the weekend, it seems like this is one very practical way to build a scripter. It could be that PascalScript has the same arrangement although undoubtedly, the names will be different.
I decided to add some documentation of my own. Its not very thorough but it should help out anyone who is new to Pascal Script.
Heres the link.
Some of us are using PascalScript here but docs are a little thin. You can take a look at the source of Innosetup (the installer) since this uses an editor and script engine from PascalScript to provide its own pascal scripting.
Brian
The samples folder that comes with PascalScript is very useful, and performs reasonably well as a form of applied documentation.