XNA GUI
Morbius (guest) 09 Aug 2012 19:36
How about some GUI tutorials for XNA. That would include some kind of viewport for the game, then side bars or something for buttons/interface.
XNA GUI
Morbius (guest) 09 Aug 2012 19:36
This is a great suggestion, and something a lot of people struggle with in XNA. I've had a lot of people ask about this topic as well.
And add section about how to make shaped buttons :] Know the principle, but not how to implement it in C# or XNA.
1) load into screen a bitmap which contains different color areas for each button
2) pick screens color at mouse coordinates
3) switch statement to select button by color
I really liked this way of managing menus
The GUI stuff is a great idea, including discussing how to load the image and draw parts of it when the button is in various states (active, disabled, etc., and even animations between transitions).
But I don't think you want to do selection based on pixel color. There are just too many ways that can go wrong. You really just want to do it based on a bounding rectangle, or perhaps a more precise shape like a rounded rectangle, but not based on pixel color. As an example, doing it with color means if your artist/graphic designer decides to change the colors of the buttons, you have to go make code changes. That's not something that should require a code change.
As my game-from-scratch tutorial set gets under way, it will definitely involve some menu/GUI stuff.
Well this is a little embarrassing. Apparently I was talking about this 16 months ago, and no, I still haven't started. But good news, I'll be starting on the game for the game-from-scratch tutorials on February 7th! (Feel free to jump in to our little informal competition that we talked about in that thread.)
How do you think someone would start learning easier ? I know the key is to practice but what is the first thing someone should try first because if someone tries to make a 3D game he will fail if his just a beginner.
Like myself, I will go through all your tutorials and I will have to make a game in XNA to be able to pass my assignment, but I want to go into Unity after that. Because I am not used with C# and I don't really know how to use it I will stick with XNA until I get much better.
With game development, and software development in general, there's no way to really learn and grow without doing it. You've got to make games to learn. Reading tutorials can only take you so far. But all of this is the very reason why I wanted to do a game-from-scratch set of tutorials to begin with. It gives people an example of one possible way to do things, and may help them get over some of the hurdles with integrating all of the pieces in the other tutorials.
By the way, Unity is a great game engine too. XNA is a thinner framework, which generally translates to more power and flexibility, at the cost of having to do more work on your own, while Unity gives you more features from the get-go, while boxing you in in certain specific ways. Those limits may not cause problems for you depending on the game, or they might (and then you'd have to find a way to work around/through it). There's definitely a spot in the market for both, and whatever you learn in one will be helpful in learning the other.
pfff. REAL programmers write directly in machine code.
But really, the best way is just to sit down and start programming stuff. If you are completely new, start by getting used to the syntax and making it do simple stuff, like Hello World, simple loops like counting all numbers from zero up to the one the user put in.
Once you are comfortable, start with OOP (Object oriented programming) and learn about inheritance, operator overloading and interfaces.It may also be a good idea to look at common data structures such as linked lists, stacks, arrays and hash tables.
Once you got the basics, try your hands at a simple project. If you say "yha, I can do that" it is too easy and if you say "I can not do that" it is too hard. When you say "Can I do that?" you got the perfect sweetspot. Start with something simple like tick-tack-toe and move upwards from there, increasing the size and complexity a little bit with every step.
As someone who are studying computer structure and architecture I can tell you that theory have very little value in the beginning. Start by just doing all the stuff and finish with the theory to fill in holes and getting a deeper understanding.
/forum/t-549509/xna-gui#post-