Howdy D.I.C's!

Before the flaming begins, I know I could ask this question on a Microsoft forum, or read up as much as possible then make my own mind but, but that wouldn't contribute to the mighty D.I.C, so it's going in here, like it or not

After being presented with a game script about 6 months ago, I started to think seriously about creating the dev team for it. I'm trying to convince my peers to allow me to hire a 3D game programming team, as we already have animators, designers and a lot of system / server administrators. As anyone should, I'm trying to gather as much info as possible about available game engines that we could use, and came accross the XNA game studio.

I downloaded it yesterday, and after a few hours got my first 'game' up and running with a little help from the tutorials (which I have to say were pretty good, so thumbs up there). One thing I noticed though was that the FPS was really low for my machine, especially when I loaded a couple of particle systems and models into my scene. (I'm running 2x9800 GX2's so I doubt it's a problem with my graphics cards)

So my question is this:

Is XNA a 'game toolkit' frowned upon by the masses, with low performance on mediocre detailed games?

I'd love to find a game engine with decent performance without having to ask my boss for 200k for the crisis engine So if anyone can recommend, I'm all ears. (Does't matter what programming platform it sits on).

P.S. Please don't say buld your own engine... A friends company built theirs... over 6 years... huge team... huge cost... me fired... bad times... (You see where that goes)

This post has been edited by pemcconnell: 9 Oct, 2008 - 12:53 AM

Try the Irrlicht engine, it is written in c++ has excellent tutorials and its free

go for it

cheers buddy - looking it up now

It depends on what you want to do. XNA is good for those who really don't know much about programming (which is a category you aren't in it appears). It's worth a dabble though, since, if you have a subscription, can put your creations on Xbox Live.

Cheers for the advice KYA, taken well onboard.

I was playing about with XNA a bit more today and found that I couldn't modify the engine, only the tools it provided...

*Waves goodbye at XNA.

Downloaded that Irrlicht engine which to my delight was small, easy to use, and best of all... FREE AND OPEN SOURCED! wooty wooty gum drops. The documentation and demos were also in top form so happy days

Loaded the same poly models and particle system I used in XNA, into Irrlicht and the FPS problem was no more! The only 'worries' I have would be that the shader model support is quite low, and there is no dx10, but either I can live without (don't know if it would suit a production environment though )

I'm leaving it at that for now, and am off to look at some paid-for engines, but it's sitting at the top of the pile for now

OP.. it all depends on what you want to get done. XNA is a hobbiest's development area. Has there been any commerical games made for it? Nothing that I can remember, but a whole lot of Xboxlive Arcade games have been put out.

It sounds like you are going a bit more on larger route and I would expect you to go beyond the hobbiest engine.

In effect - more commerical engines and hobbiest engines have their places..



Hey now Kya... don't say that out loud! While XNA doesn't let you muck around in the engine it takes a fair amount of programming knowledge to get something off the ground. Too many people have assaulted me over the years about "d00d! I wantz a mmorpg like w0w butt not w0w. I wantz to programz it... do u hav da codez?". AFter figuring out the most they have ever programmed something was making a HTML page in MSWord, and then I have to explain that to use XNA would require at least a basic understanding of programming. XNA might not be uber, but it sure as hell isn't drag and drop!

I love writing my own game engines, so much so that it seems I rarely actually complete anything more than a demo.

Don't get me wrong I'd love to build my own engine, but time is a factor as I would need to have a flight-demo off the ground in 12 months to get some more funding in from external parties, so time is a big constraint

The thing I liked most about the Irrlicht engine is that you can modify the engine - and there isn't too much code, so for now it's looking good for that freebie (There is something strange about wanting to take on a freeware package for a production environment though - seems... wierd, lol)

Today I'm dedicating myself to truevision which is the cheapest out of my list of paid-for engines ($150), so hopefully I'll get some good results, and will let you guys know how it goes

Have you looked at the Torque engine. It's not free, but the licensing fees are pretty low from what I understand. It is great for low budget indie game developers and pretty good from what I have seen. It's at least worth checking out.

I tried both Ogre and Torque out over the weekend and thought that they were both quite good, and easy to understand. However, performance wise I thought I got more out of the Ogre engine, and there was also a lot of code already done for me (shaders and effects librarys sitting and waiting to be used). I also found that particle collision had a far better result in Ogre.

Incase anyone was wondering about truevision...

Tested it out and thought it was a great tool. Comes with a lot of great features and the engine runs pretty fast. Unfortunately as it is such a large application I haven't got round to testing it 100% yet, and I did get a bit distracted with Ogre, but I promise I'll tuck into it today and let you guys know the full story - looks good so far though!