So I've been playing with GSE for a couple days (I got off to a late start as I went on vacation the day after it was released) and I'm loving it. Why? The GSE team has made it ridiculously easy to get an XNA app running, basically a couple of clicks. Let's see:
- Fire up C# 2005 Express
- Click the Create Project link on the Start Page
- Select Windows Game (XNA) and give it a title
- Click OK
That's it - 4 steps. Granted, it's not Half-Life 3, but there's a ton of stuff that gets added behind the scenes to make managing your game very easy. Want to show a sprite? Here ya go:
Add the following to the Game1 class that gets created above:
private SpriteBatch _batch;
private Texture2D _sprite;
Add the following to the constructor:
_batch =
new SpriteBatch(this.graphics.GraphicsDevice);
_sprite = Texture2D.FromFile(this.graphics.GraphicsDevice, "sprites.dds");
Add the following to the Draw() method:
_batch.Begin(
SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);
_batch.Draw(_sprite, new Rectangle(0, 0, 128, 128), new Rectangle(0,0,128,128), Color.White);
_batch.End();
Wanna make that an animated sprite? Just a couple of lines more code since someone's already released a class to handle it for you. The GSE community has been steadily releasing samples and tutorials since the release of GSE.
I urge anyone that's interested in doing indie game development to check out GSE. I for one can't wait to see my games running on my 360. :)