What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

[Goufunaki]

Alright, the only thing I learned from Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express is how to transfer games from the PC to the 360.

Other than that, I have no knowledge of C# what so ever, and looking at the sample game's stuff leaves me clueless. Basically just want to learn how to make 2D games.

[Armored]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

.... I remember someone here doing this kinda stuff..... marcman? o.O Err

[thetruecoolness]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

I did a bit of work in C# (some really terrrible bittorrent client, but my part [the GUI] worked flawlessly and had double buffering]). I would check out www.gamedev.net for articles on it. Pretty sure I saw some articles on there for it.

[Goufunaki]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

cool, i'll check it out when I can. thanks

[Gustaff 13]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

What kinda game are you gonna make? :o

[Goufunaki]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

I want to make a fighting game. Been wanting to for years. If anyone's played my Star Warrior games on RPG Maker (I've since changed names for it), it's mainly gonna have those characters. It was never meant to be an RPG, but 1 on 1 fighting much like street fighter and king of fighters.

[Crimson Knight]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

I wanna make a fighter too! :O

But I wanna do it now, so I'm sure as hell not gonna **** up and do it on a language like C, that'll take years. I've learned to leave languages like that to the professionals. :3 I believe, that you have to learn the language first, THEN learn how that language can be translated into a game-making factory. I don't have time for that ****.

I would suggest making one on Game Maker. If you manage to create a decent fighter, and G-Java happens to be good enough to do something useful;(like convert GML to Java and hopefully in the future, Java to C), you could get the more portable version with less work from the ground up. It pays to learn a language that's actually GAME oriented.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

Umm C# is becoming a game oriented language especially when paired with XNA (though I do see your point that it's not a game scripting language, it is a general purpose programming language for Windows computers), for XBOX 360 and Windows anyway. Compilers have come a long way, and these days it's become more about code reuse and design than just raw performance. Most optimizations can be done by just writing decent code, and through the compiler, and not have to hand optimize each line in assembly anymore.

Your other point however is valid, and if you're doing this as any kind of career building activity for games industry, a lot of bigger companies worry more about whether you can extend an existing code base than if you can make your own game engine from scratch (unless of course you want to be an engine architect). As one of the questions I was asked a couple of years ago for an EA internship was if I had ever worked with a large undocumented code base before, which I hadn't really.

Writing a game engine from scratch is quite challenging and will likely take you at least a year, not counting learning the language. Most game companies take about that long and they have large teams working on this. Of course they're still using C++ and assembly in certain places, as the games industry will be slow to change from it's tried and true methods, to new ones (which are likely more efficient, but may not have the performance of the old methods).

In a semester I was able to write a point and click adventure game in Java, but it was still fairly simple, and also took advantage of a lot of the new features in Java for 2D graphics and speedy image loading and drawing. I also had a little help with it from 2 of the other members of my team but I was the primary programmer and the others created assets for the game.

So you might want to look for some C# game frameworks on the net (might be some on gamedev). I'm sure there are quite a few available especially now that C# is used in XNA, though quite a few people have been using it for PC games for a few years. Though realize you will likely also need to learn DirectX, or OpenGL, as C#'s default graphics capabilities are lacking (it does not have double buffering in it's UI objects by default, you would have to make your own by changing out bitmaps). Though I guess if you're going to use XNA I believe that has it's own DirectX bindings, though I can't find out since it's only for WinXP, and I have 2000.

[Misty]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

I want to make a fighting game. Been wanting to for years. If anyone's played my Star Warrior games on RPG Maker (I've since changed names for it), it's mainly gonna have those characters. It was never meant to be an RPG, but 1 on 1 fighting much like street fighter and king of fighters.

I'm aware of game software that allows you to make your own games, but making your own fighting game sounds really cool to me. I remember they had something called MUGEN where you could make fighting games using a simplified programming language (correct me if I don't know what I'm saying--I'm no expert in this!) One of my favorite fan-made fighters was Brutal: Paws of Fury--based on an old Super NES fighting game that had animal characters in it. The version this guy made took it to a new level and actually made it fun and playable. Think Street Fighter with Lions, Tigers and Bears (oh, my.)

[Goufunaki]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

mugen's cool, but all people do with it is rip sprites from other games. I've never seen an actual original mugen game. Also, it's so easy to just take characters from other mugen titles and put them in your own.


Also, Mugen doesn't like Windows XP apparently. I never got it to work on it.

[Gustaff 13]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

Dear truecoolness,

SWOOSH! *hand over head gesture*


Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Crimson's Gamemaker idea. It's entirely possible that as we speak, someone's hard at work on a method to convert Gamemaker to XBN, right? Right?!

If so I second that suggestion to Gou.
I heard it's language is similar to C++ with a lot of grunt work done for you and a lot of pre-made functions. Version 7 is coming out soon.

[Chad]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

Though realize you will likely also need to learn DirectX, or OpenGL, as C#'s default graphics capabilities are lacking (it does not have double buffering in it's UI objects by default, you would have to make your own by changing out bitmaps). Though I guess if you're going to use XNA I believe that has it's own DirectX bindings, though I can't find out since it's only for WinXP, and I have 2000.

Last I heard C# + OpenGL still equaled unplayable speeds.

As for C# references.
Of course I second, http://www.gamedev.net. Glad it's back up.
http://www.functionx.com/csharp/ I found this site when I was trying to figure out some stuff for Tools programming. It seemed like it had pretty decent tutorials.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

Well I haven't seen it used on many large scale projects so it's possible that's still true, but I bet DirectX runs better on it, given they're both Microsofts babies. But really C# is a better version of J#, which was a better version of J++ I guess, which was Microsofts bad attempt at making a Java clone. But C# is pretty nice to program on for GUI stuff, with it's GUI creator, and isn't too bad for other things, and while Visual Studio is not the best IDE in my opinion, it's still really nice and does lots of things for you, and is certainly up there as one of the best. One thing I would suggest against though is ever trying to use C++ and C# together, or really regular C++ with any .Net stuff. The one time I tried was a nightmare.

Gamemaker is probably a decent place for novice programmers to try to make games with. But really if you plan on doing any major programming work, finding an actual game framework is the way to go. Now if you plan on being a level designer and using scripting code, then yeah something like Gamemaker or even your favorite PC games own world creation tools would be good (since they typically have their own scripting engines).

But if you want to do any backend work it would be good to start with some game framework and use that in the language it's written in, some advice I should probably follow, though I've been doing a lot of web development stuff lately (mainly an AJAX chat which might become the chat here in a couple of months or so). Of course for some reason I like starting from scratch, but that's because I like to think more about the design of a program, than actually making an end product a lot of the time. Plus though it's not good, I find it easier to start from scratch and not having to learn someone else's code, though of course I'll reuse whatever code I've written for other projects.

So yeah gamemaker and similar tools are nice for non programmers to make games, but if you really want to program, learn a language, then learn how to use that language to make games. Then learn another language and make a game in that. As for someone converting Gamemaker to XNA, who knows, but it's likely someone is working on it. How much progress they've made and whether they'll finish it is the big question. Though I'm sure as XNA picks up steam there will be more and more articles and books on how to use it, and they will likely teach you just enough C# to make games without having to worry about the whole language.

[Crimson Knight]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

mugen's cool, but all people do with it is rip sprites from other games. I've never seen an actual original mugen game. Also, it's so easy to just take characters from other mugen titles and put them in your own.

True, it's easier to just rip characters, stages and just make your own crossover. But MUGEN is flexible enough, that you could make an tourney capable fighter. If I had artists, I could probably do an original fighter. Most of the original ones for MUGEN suck though.

Also, Mugen doesn't like Windows XP apparently. I never got it to work on it.

There's a windows version of MUGEN that was leaked, and there's a patch to fix various problems in it, search for "no limit winmugen patch", I think that was it.

Out of curiosity, what's your opinion of Crimson's Gamemaker idea. It's entirely possible that as we speak, someone's hard at work on a method to convert Gamemaker to XBN, right? Right?!

I know G-Java's being worked on with a C version in the works. But these projects are taking a long time. And even if there was a converter to C, I'd suggest learning the appropriate languages, that is if you wanted to say, make multiple ports or be able to take advantage of a C template of a game.

I heard it's language is similar to C++ with a lot of grunt work done for you and a lot of pre-made functions.

Game Maker's GML is a godsend IMO. Not only does it do the grunt work, it's not such a ***** with its syntax, so whether or not you have programming experience, you can jump right in and write the way you want to.

If one wants to make a game, I think GM's the way to go. However, if you plan on being professional and getting into the respective industry to make profits and such, it might be best to learn the popular languages.

[Chad]

Re: What are some good C# books/sites for making games?

Well I haven't seen it used on many large scale projects so it's possible that's still true, but I bet DirectX runs better on it, given they're both Microsofts babies. But really C# is a better version of J#, which was a better version of J++ I guess, which was Microsofts bad attempt at making a Java clone. But C# is pretty nice to program on for GUI stuff, with it's GUI creator, and isn't too bad for other things, and while Visual Studio is not the best IDE in my opinion, it's still really nice and does lots of things for you, and is certainly up there as one of the best. One thing I would suggest against though is ever trying to use C++ and C# together, or really regular C++ with any .Net stuff. The one time I tried was a nightmare.

I love C# for tools.

I had to use a C++ tile engine in a C# tile editor. I still cry myself to sleep.