I'm following tutorials on Riemers.net, which by the way is an amazing site to learn game programming for C#/XNA.

I went through the 2D tutorial which was great, and now starts 3D.

What is annoying me is that right away, Riemers instructs you to download something called an effect file (xxxx.fx), which is used to instruct the program how to display triangles.

His .fx file is very long and complicated, and he gives no real introduction to that. If XNA requires even a basic effect file to draw triangles, why arent all tutorials teaching you how to create the effect file?

I don't know how he thinks someone can go from creating the first window of XNA to creating an effect file.. it just isn't possible.

The article in question: http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/C...effect_file.php

This post has been edited by BlackPhoenix: 29 Oct, 2009 - 03:12 PM

It says right there "Don’t worry too much about this, as this is already more advanced stuff which we will handle in Series 3. " and you are complaining?

Ok, I'm trying to teach you basic math, but before I teach you how to multiply numbers i give you this massive multiplication table and I'm like "OK SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO MULTIPLY 7 X 13!?!?!?", then continue 20 more tutorials using this 7x13 knowledge without ever explaining it.

Its great that he'll go over it eventually, but I'm gonna have to go back to square 1 once I learn what he was doing anyway.

I'm sorry, but you are being ridiculous. Do you understand how everything in the .NET library works at the machine level? It's a massive download that you have to do with no explanation of how it works, but you still use it.

Well your comeback was extremelyyyyy abstract but I can't deny your claims. Touché I guess

I think I will move this to game programming.

In my first programming course we used Java and we created a program in our first class, a hello world:

public class X {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.Out.Print("hello world");
  }
}
// or something like that, haven't programmed java for a few months

If our teacher would have taught us what is a class and what is a method or what the heck is inside System.Out.Print(), we would have wrote our hello world at the end of the whole course after studying theory for about 2 months about basic stuff. Instead, she just said "don't worry about these things, they are always there, just write them" which of course confused us a bit but we wrote them there and ran the program and it printed out "hello world".

After that we studied data types, arrays, loops, if statements and things like that before we jumped into methods. And during that introduction to programming course we didn't even take a look at classes, they came in during the next course.

I'm telling this because this can be reflected to your case. To keep students more motivated about programming it's better to jump right into the actual programming (printing out hello world) without getting into details such as classes or methods or in your case, the content of the .fx file. That information come later when the time is right.

The FX file is a D3DXEffect Object, therefore at this early stage of your journey in the world of XNA you don't need to focus on such things. While you are still learning the "backbone" of XNA projects (the code) you shouldn't focus on making graphics and other secondary stuff (like sounds or other game resources).

Eventually, when you will see that your XNA skills are pretty good, you will probably want to allocate more time for graphics and other stuff.

sixofeleven has good tuts, check those out

I know that this kind of an old post, but I just wanted to point out something about your first post that no one else did...

Effect files are not required to to draw triangles. You can actually draw any shape straight from your code. So, effect files are not neccessary, but they do make things simpler and keep your code more maintanable (and they make your game look cool).