Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Installing XNA for Visual Studio 2015

I was asked about installing XNA into Visual Studios 2015 because I noted that it was very simple and straightforward.

I knew that there were others like me who are still using XNA so I knew that a Google search would do plenty to help me find how to get my project working in VS2015 (community)

My search quickly brought up a a Stack Overflow answer that points to an updated post by MXA with the title "XNA 4.0 Refresh (Visual Studio 2015)", which was last updated in November of 2015.

This site gives you a single downloadable .zip file to download, and then instructions on what you need to do to install all the components necessary for installing the extension itself

Once you have unpacked the .zip file, just install the pieces one by one in the order given, they don't take long at all.

Before install extension:
  1. Install DirectX
  2. Install Xna Framework 4.0 Redistribution
  3. Install Xna Game Studio 4.0 Platform Tools
  4. Install Xna Game Studio 4.0 Shared
Once the last one finishes, just double click the extension and it will install it, and you are ready to roll.  

I wasn't paying complete attention to my computer while I was doing this, so I can't give you a good estimate about how long it really took.  the download was painfully slow because of the connection that I was on, but the installing the packages didn't seem to take very long at all. 

My Project was already created prior to installing XNA into VS2015, so I don't know how easy it is to get started or set up the different types of projects.  I look forward to doing some development in XNA though.


Windows/XboX/Windows Phone Game

With the recent Microsoft Build event showcasing a lot of mobile development and Gaming development, I really got to thinking about the game where I started with a basic tutorial and expanded the game play dramatically.  

Currently it is a 2D scroller type game, but it scrolls in all directions on a defined World(Space/Universe) map.  My goals up until now had been to further develop the 2D game with the final goal being to interpret it into a 3D game that would support online game play.  The more I thought about the game and the aspect of mobile development along with flying quadcopters I came up with the idea of creating an interactive game play where the user could control the player by turning or tilting the screen in order to turn the player piece.  I think this is a wonderful idea for the small game that I have so far and would make it very playable for the mobile platform.  my thoughts are that once I created the game for Windows phone that I could port it to the Android market immediately once I figured out the best way to do that.  

I haven't yet looked into porting to the Android devices but I don't think that it should be too difficult given that Xamarin is now free with Visual Studios and there is a current build of XNA for Visual Studios 2015 as well. 

Over the weekend I updated Visual Studios 2015 Community edition and installed the Xamarin portion, I also installed XNA into Visual Studios 2015 which was a lot easier than it had been in the past to install into other versions of Visual Studios.

I do have a lot of code to clean up, I keep trying to tell myself not to be so hard on myself, I did write the code many years ago and didn't know as much about coding standards and such as I do now.

I am also going to be looking into Azure for testing and hosting for the game itself.  I am not going to lie to you, but the main reason is because of the demo during build for Age of Ascent,  I was really impressed with what they showed there and the way that you can push out updates to the code to different servers that are all hosting the same game instance.  

I am looking forward to implementing some more code into my game and making it enjoyable for everyone. 

I am not so much of an Apple person, but I have also thrown around the idea of porting it to the iPhone market as well, but that is for another set of posts, I am sure there is going to be a lot going into that as well.