Introduction to XNA 3.0

XNA Game Studio 3.0 is a Framework offered by Microsoft for creating games with C#. With it you can create Windows games, XBOX 360 games and games for Zune. I don't have an XBOX 360 or a Zune so I really have no idea about those platforms.

For Windows games you must meet the minimum requirements for Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and you must have a graphics card that supports Pixel Shader 1.1 or better. Most modern ATI and nVidia graphics cards support Pixel Shader 1.1 or better. If you do not have a card that supports Pixel Shader 1.1 you really can not program in XNA.

In XNA you have the Content Pipeline. It is used to import a wide variety of content to your project. For the purposes of what I will be doing all you have to worry about is Texture2D, which will be used for tiling and sprites and sound files. Eventually there will be some XML files but I am going to make custom importers, processors and exporters to compile them into .XNB files. Otherwise the XML files could be edited by others playing your game and they can change the content of your game.

XNA has two methods that are called often. They are the Draw and Update methods. In the Update method you process thing like input, collisions, moving objects, etc. In the Draw method you draw your scene. The rate at which they are called can be changed programmatically.

Tomorrow, or the next day, I plan on posting a tutorial on how to do basic tiling. So look for that in the next do or so.