XNA Game Studio 3.0 was released recently, and I downloaded it. I had tried the original 1.0 release back in 2006, and found it to be interesting but somewhat difficult. At that time I hadn’t yet any 3D programming experience (my foray being with OpenGL later that year), and I think that was the principal barrier for me. XNA doesn’t have a fixed-function pipeline nor an immediate mode, both of which are much easier to get started with (someone agrees with me).
Interestingly the (recently released) OpenGL 3.0 spec was supposed to do away with both the fixed-function pipeline and immediate mode, but they were instead left intact and marked as deprecated. They’ll work for now, though it’s unclear how long they will continue to do so. This may eventually have some implications for those learning (or teaching) 3D programming.
Getting back to XNA, presently I’m trying to do something that’s trivial in OpenGL: draw points and lines in 3-space. I haven’t yet had any success, though I have some leads and a rough idea of what’s involved–it is, as I am wont to say, non-trivial.
I do rather like most of the other things about XNA though, now that I understand it better. One small detail that is convenient for me: XNA has not inherited the left-handed coordinate system of its ancestor Direct3D, and instead uses the same right-handed coordinate system as does OpenGL.
