[BBeck]

Wow! FINALLY! My website is up. It's primary purpose is to teach beginning XNA programmers (with a background in C# and maybe some 2D XNA experience) how to program in 3D. The focus is on virtual realities since you could use 3D XNA to make a CAD program, or 3D Monopoly, or 3D Pac Man, or 3D Level editors, or other things. It's about creating virtual environments common to First Person Shooters, Role Playing Games, Racing Games, Sports Games, or really 90% of the games you see these days for the PC or consoles.

The website is

http://xna3d101.com

It's still partially under construction. I've been extremely hesitant to let anyone know about it until it was at least semi-ready. Well, I finally have enough of the first tutorial (Lesson 2 - The Holodeck) to feel comfortable to make the "unvailing". The Holodeck tutorial is only about half finished, but - out of what is there so far - I've published it, debugged it, and run through it, and it produces a program that at least gets people started. So, for someone who hasn't done XNA 3D before, even what is there currently, may be exciting. I have 3 parts to Lesson 2 and it will probably be about 6 parts when I get the whole lesson published. Hopefully, I'll get the rest of Lesson 2 done sometime in the next week. The computer code is written; I just need to write the tutorial for the rest of the lesson and then step through it to make sure it works. I had hoped to get them done this past couple of days, but I got bogged down setting up the blog, setting up the file sharing for source code and resource downloads, remaking the mast head, and several other things that all had to do with setting up the website rather than making the tutorials. But I think the website is at a point now where I can go back to writing tutorials again.

The long term goal is to produce something similar to Riemer's tutorials and then go beyond that. Eventually, I will be covering some common ground with his tutorials, such as 3D terrains. But I'll be taking a different enough approach that there shouldn't be a terrible lot of overlap and this should be a good alternate view of such topics.

Anyway, I would love for you guys to check it out and maybe give me any suggestions on making it easier to use, understand, etc. And if you haven't done 3D in XNA maybe I can teach you a thing or two.

This post has been edited by BBeck: 03 June 2012 - 07:14 PM

[Kilorn]

I'm going to move this up to the News and Articles section since it's not a thread attempting to get help for XNA related issues.

As for the site itself, good job so far! I don't have time to work through your tutorials, but from what I've seen of your progress on this site over the past month or two since you joined, I'm sure they are incredibly informative. Only suggestion I have for the site, would be to add a link to DIC on there. Other than that, keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing what you can do with this site!

[BBeck]

Kilorn, on 03 June 2012 - 07:50 PM, said:

I'm going to move this up to the News and Articles section since it's not a thread attempting to get help for XNA related issues.

As for the site itself, good job so far! I don't have time to work through your tutorials, but from what I've seen of your progress on this site over the past month or two since you joined, I'm sure they are incredibly informative. Only suggestion I have for the site, would be to add a link to DIC on there. Other than that, keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing what you can do with this site!

Thanks!

[DanielLeone]

It looks quite good BBeck!

I will definitely be reading these sometime, especially the Vectors one .

I'm not really ready for 3D yet, but I can assure you you'll be the first website I visit when I am .

As I said, it looks good, and I wish you all the best with it.

Thanks,
Daniel,

I don't really think putting it in this forum was a good idea, even though it technically belongs here. It seems pretty unvisited, and would draw more attention back where it was.

Do you think sometimes this place has too many forums?

This post has been edited by DanielLeone: 05 June 2012 - 07:20 AM

[modi123_1]

Quote

I don't really think putting it in this forum was a good idea, even though it technically belongs here. It seems pretty unvisited, and would draw more attention back where it was.

No, it is often visited, but less than often posted in. I was thinking about flipping it to 'share my project', but kilorn is also right.

Quote

Do you think sometimes this place has too many forums?

Shockingly - programming has many faucets and I do enjoy me some organization!

[BBeck]

DanielLeone, on 05 June 2012 - 07:19 AM, said:

It looks quite good BBeck!

I will definitely be reading these sometime, especially the Vectors one .

I'm not really ready for 3D yet, but I can assure you you'll be the first website I visit when I am .

As I said, it looks good, and I wish you all the best with it.

Thanks,
Daniel,

I don't really think putting it in this forum was a good idea, even though it technically belongs here. It seems pretty unvisited, and would draw more attention back where it was.

Do you think sometimes this place has too many forums?

Thanks! I'll try and finish up the Vector tutorial before next week.

I think most XNA game programmers are really into 2D for several reasons, not the least of which is that there seems to be more of a market for 2D XNA games out there. That's cool. I just wanted to focus on 3D because that's what I'm into. I like seeing a balance between 2D and 3D in the game development world. I remember when 2D games were starting to disappear and I was saying "Hey! Wait! 2D games can still be fun! Not every game out there has to be 3D! Just because it's in 3D doesn't make it "fun". There were a lot of 2D games that were as good as any 3D game out there." Now the tide is kind of turning in the development world and everyone wants to develop for phones and tablets and 2D is all the rage again.

Anyway, I really like doing 3D and I felt that - if I can get a hand full of tutorials written - I could fill a niche where there seems to be a lack of 3D tutorials for XNA on certain topics.

Anyways, thanks for checking it out and the complements!

As far as having the thread over in news. Well, I figure that should work out pretty well. It may not get noticed quite as much over the next couple of days, but if you look at the dates on the posts in the news section you can see it will likely stay in the top five for quite a while and that gives it a lot of time to be seen. And if it were in the Q&A section it would probably get pushed off to another page in a week or two. So, over the long haul it will probably get noticed in News more.

Plus, that works out pretty well anyway. A flood of people coming to the site right now is maybe not the best thing; the site is currently barely offering any content with the first major tutorial "Lesson 2" only about 1/3rd posted. I just barely had enough there to feel comfortable sharing it with the world and was really debating on whether the site was really ready for launch. As I get more content posted over the next couple of weeks and after that, that would be when I really want most people showing up. It's not real good for a bunch of people to show up, decide there's no content or anything interesting, and never come back. It's just better if it's more like a slow steady stream of people over time. So being in the News section should basically work towards that aim.

Anyway, thanks for the compliments! I'm going to try to get more content there for people soon.