Getting frustrated - MDX, XNA...

[Ethan]

First of all I wish to to salute everyone on this forum and special greetings to the author of thehazymind.com website.
Great website, very useful, congratulations on all the fine tutorials and thank you for the time you spent writting them.

I don't have a point with this post but seeing that there is a 'general discussion' area of the forum I thought that I shall rant about my frustration.

First, a short introduction: I'm 21 years old and I've been interested in computers and programing since grade 7 when I got my first pc. Currently I'm running my own company in London (UK) while I'm studying (second year) an university degree. I'm very ambitious and I've been always interested in doing big things. No big surprise that I've decided at some point (like many people out there I presume) to create my own game and such but it wasn't long until it became clear that the lack of time, people and most of all money are actually big factors which can't be ignored. However, I've always used my free time to learn as much as possible and work as efficiently as possible in order to compensate for those things.

I've gone along this path:
Using borland c++, it was taking too long to create anything decent. Switched to Visual Basic 6, by doing tutorials from a Visual Basic 4 book and it was much better but it was still very hard to create a nice graphical application. Support for VB6 stoped, the new .net things came out and everyone stopped writting anything for vb6. I decided to switch to .net then and decided to do c++. I got discouraged when i've seen how complicated the .net version is compared to how intuitive vb6 was, so I went back decided on making it work. So, after a while I made directx work with vb and everything seemed to be better. Until directx 9 came out and directx 9 is not supported by visual basic 6. Long story short, when the 2005 express edition came out I was all amazed and such that *they* finally did a great job and created such a thing and I started using since C# 2005. After a while I started the whole directx thing again and decided to use MDX because it seemed more straight forward and I estimated that it will take less time to do something with MDX than other alternatives. After I realised what's the deal with MDX 1.1 and MDX 2 and decided to stick to MDX 2 and now, guess what !!, there is no more MDX 2 because - They killed MDX, they're bastards! (south park reference) Well, its not that bad in the end as XNA will be friendly with xbox 360 which is great. But still !!!

My frustration exists because - with university, work, life etc, there isn't much time left to properly work on a side project and everytime I get familiar with something, there is a new thing comming out, which is ok because things are suppose to change, but still, doesn't help. Secondly, it is so hard to find people interested into these things. Universities in London recently 'upgraded' and are now teaching more down to earth programing things, more precisely c++ .net. Reason for which I ran as far away as possible and ended up doing Accounting and Business Management as university degree, which in the end is not that bad of a choice as it should help with the whole business running. You would expect however to find someone great at programming in the whole computer science department but when they teach for a whole year how to do console mathematical algorithms or when they take a whole year to create a 'project' which in the end is a macro for ms access -> not sure what to think or what/who to look for, which leads me to my question - where are all the programmers which work for EA games (for example) learn the 'good stuff' !?

Anyway, hope I didn't bore anyone with this.

Ethan

[mikeschuld]

They all got a general degree in computer science from a prestigious school, ignored everything they learned there, and then used the combination of the degree they got and the REAL weekend programming they did on the side to get their feet in the door. At least that's how I have always looked at it. I am personally getting a degree in Computer Science here in the U.S., but I am not putting much faith in the degree itself as the focus I am obviously going for is not taught in a general engineering school. Either way a related degree will help getting a job. Doing the business side of things is also a good idea if your focus is more on starting an independent game studio (as most of the people who participate in the forums here probably are.) Either way, good luck with the school. It is a difficult thing to keep at top priority with your mind on bigger and better things all the time.

[Ethan]

Hello again. Well, I got started with XNA and I must say that it's not as bad as I thought. It is quite straight forward to work with it and it is similar with mdx as name functions go etc. I just hope that at some point its not going to start crashing out of nowhere, but even if it does, I guess its understandable as it is in beta stage. From what I read on the Microsoft website the final version is suppose to come out spring of 2007 which isn't that far away so that's good. What I couldn't find information is regarding how is it going to work with xbox 360. Is the whole thing about developers having to subscribe to some online xbox 'creators club' (or something) in order to test/share applications, just because now its beta or is this what they're planning for the final version as well? With the final version of XNA will developers be able to sell their games and the users installing the game and running the game just like any other game or it is not meant to work like that ?

In a slightly related topic, I've created myself a convertor so I can export models from 3DS Max, and after converting I end up with a file which is just a big triangle list with info for texture coordinates and similar. With this, I've been able to load lots of nice high poly models with XNA and all seems to be working fine. From what I understand (maybe i'm mistaking), there is no .X support in this beta stage so one could not load a .X model with XNA ? Is this true ? Even before, I always planned to make my own format for the geometry for easy loading because I got kind of scared about the .X format. After loading a few .X models the application seemed to go unusually slow for what I was expecting and also, several times the model wasn't exporting correctly from 3DS Max to the .X format and when i was loading a house, the walls, roofs and such were all scrambeled (even in the .x viewer from the directx sdk). Are this usual problems or is it just me and do you think its a good idea to creating you're own file format and avoiding .X all together. What do other people do ?

Well, I do plan to have my own game studio somewhere in the near future but not just yet. For the moment I'm doing these things as a hobby/obsession. I usually find myself undecided regarding which is the way to go and how to aproach one problem or another. For example, the .X fileformat thing - is that the official way of doing things, and anything else goes further away from the right path, or is any mehtod as good as any other as long as it works ?

Ethan

[mikeschuld]

Well , much of the model loading and related issuses are going to be handled by the Content Framework that is not entirely released yet. There is a way to create your own handlers for the content manager to use also, so making your own model format is possible, but that seems like a lot more work than just using something someone else has already made. I have had a few problems exporting .x from blender, but my roommate seems to be able to get it to work (limited support for texture coords for my shaders though.) As far as licences go. The developer studio for XNA games will be $100 a year for membership (or so I've read), and there are simple switches in the XNA API for telling it whether you want to compile for XBox or PC. I reference that shortly in the next tutorial, but I have no experience putting code in the box yet (although I know it is working because Dave of 'letskilldave.com' told me was moving the spacewars demo onto it at work the other day). They definately are going to allow sales of games you make with XNA, probably on the XBox Live Marketplace. I haven't heard anything about retail games in boxes. Either way the new live and XNA combination will open a huge world of gaming to a lot of people and a huge customer base to all of us indie developers.

[Ethan]

Until the Content Framework is released I'm continuing to experiment with my 3DS Max custom exporter.
Maybe someone wants to see some samples of what I did until now: http://www.cold-cube.com/public/3dsamples.zip

Anyone know how to calculate PRT light? I've noticed it looks same as the 'skylight' light from 3DS Max. I'm planing to pre calculate this kind of ilumination for each vertex and save it and then pass it along to the vertex shader in order to light up the geometry but also beeing able to blend it with real time NdotL light. I'm trying to create a decent per vertex lighting and not use pixel shader in order to see how fast will the application run even on lower performance graphics cards.

Experimenting with pixel shader I got carried away and implemented most things I could think about, starting from multiple color lights interaction to parallax mapping and multiple texture blending... but the fps dropped singificantly and all I was displaying was a cube (6 sides - 12 triangles) so I concluded that its not that great of an idea to use this if you plan to make your application run on older computers as not everyone has latest graphics cards.

Ethan