You may have heard about XNA. Its a framework from Microsoft designed with the intention of simplifying the process of making games. For a number of reasons, I chose to use XNA as the technological backbone for my thesis project and have been using it since the first XNA beta came out in late August. Since then, a final 1.0 version of the XNA Framework has been released and a number of community websites have sprung up around it. Here are some XNA-related resources I have found to be useful...

First and foremost, there are two forums on the MSDN website that are home to an indispensable wealth of knowledge, information and answered questions you may yourself be asking: the XNA Framework section and the XNA Game Studio Express section both have considerable overlap, but as the names would suggest, generally the former is for framework-level issues while the latter pertains to issues with the XNA GSE, the IDE used with XNA.

While there are a handful of XNA project hosting sites out there, in my experience, Three Six Box is the home of the most useful. If you are interested in picking up some 3D graphics and shader knowledge, Derek Nedelman's projects are cleanly written and demonstrate a number of things you may want to pick up like particle systems, some advanced shader techniques and how these fit into the XNA Framework.

Manders vs. Machine is the blog of Mike Manders' XNA-related experiments which has thus far hosted several interesting projects including a GPU-based Mandelbrot explorer, an interesting feedback pixel shader and game called Microbe Patrol.

Shawn Hargreaves, a member of the XNA development team, has a useful blog that tends to cover framework questions of a more technical nature in good detail.

And the award for the XNA blog with the most eye candy goes to abi.exDream.com, home of Benjamin Nitschke, the guy behind the impressive looking XNA Racer which will eventually be released as a Starter Kit. In the meantime, the complete source code for his game Rocket Commander can be found here. Its a big one and I haven't looked to deeply into it yet, but it seems to be well organized and the game demonstrates some nice graphical effects.

James Watson of DudleySoft has shared a Cutscene Camera library that may be useful. It can be used to smoothly interpolate between camera angles using XNA's built-in Curve classes.

Cornflower Blue is the blog of another XNA team member at Microsoft. There are some really useful articles here, especially a three part series about the intricacies of alpha blending, a topic that gets so much more complex when you make the jump from 2D to 3D.

I'll continue to add to this list in the future. If you have any specific XNA-related questions, ask away!

Good stuff, Aaron. There are also many good links via del.icio.us

Nice set of sites. The Man vs. Machine link is pointing to ThreeSixBox.

http://blogs.msdn.com/manders/default.aspx

and thus the link was fixed

Thank you for sharing this.

No love for ziggyware? :)

Ziggy
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