I’ve been following some of the tutorials in Learning XNA 3.0 by Arron Reed. The book has been really great for getting me up to speed and learning 3D game development on XNA. I was able to create this demo using my own models created from Blender:
The video is recorded using a trial version for Fraps. Besides being able to record video from a videogame souce, it can also be used for benchmarking purposes with the statistics saved to file. I’ll likely purchase the software unless someone recommends something better to use. In the demo I slightly modified my previous spaceship model to look a bit better and loaded several of them to fly through space. I also created a first person camera to shoot spheres and implemented some basic collision detection using bounding spheres to determine whether or not objects have collided.
Currently there’s no texturing, I should probably look into that later on. Right now I want to try learning more about the HLSL (High Level Shader Language) used in XNA and implementing a particle system. After that I think I’m ready to actually begin work on my intended XNA game.
Looks like a great start.