Hi Halowars,

There are many people in the same shoes you are in. It all depends how much time and effort you want to put into it. Many things can be done without fully understanding them (usually using something does not require to understand all the details), but many people want to understand more and more as they use it more and more.

Think of the DeltaEngine as "one level up" from just using a framework like XNA or MonoGame or OpenTK or SharpDX. In fact we have all those frameworks included in the Delta Engine. Again, if you just want to use it and lets say show a sprite on screen or add a textbox and hock up some commands to it, you do not have to understand XNA, MonoGame, OpenTK or SharpDX. If you want you can still dig deeper and do all the low level stuff we try to hide away. It is all open source and right there to be modified for anyone (that is usually what game developers need the most, full flexibility, each game has different demands).

I recommend starting with some tutorials and a clear goal on what you want to do with that knowledge (maybe a breakout clone or something similar, keep it real and do not envision creating World of Warcraft as your first project). We have some tutorials here: http://DeltaEngine.net/Learn/Tutorials and there is tons of good information on the internet (just to recommend one site: http://CodeProject.com)

Once you have covered the basics and have something running on your PC, you might want to try to get your game running on other platforms. Normally this means learning all about the platform and languages needed to accomplish this for whatever platform you want to support (like Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, C# for Windows Phone, etc.) By using the Delta Engine this can become a bit easier again, especially if you do not care how it works and do not want to write Java or Objective-C yourself. That is exactly what the AppBuilder and our Delta Engine Cloud services do. Again, at some point you might hit a wall and then you would have to dig deeper (or ask for help).

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Hi Halowars,

If you have XNA tutorials, use them, especially if you are interested on how it all works. I have also written a book about XNA (Professional XNA Game Development) and was an XNA Microsoft MVP for 4 years. It is good to know these things, but not really required if you want to build a game.

I suggest starting with a simple problem you might have, like "How do I draw some image from my file on the desktop in my game and make it blue when I click on it?"
Now you could just look at some engine (does not have to be ours) and you try to solve that problem. If you end up with XNA, that is fine, but probably writing it in some low level framework or even low level programming language will be a lot of work (no one is going to approach that problem with assembly code nowadays).

Btw: Using the Editor you can also create your game visually, it is pretty much like Unity, Unreal, etc., we are just not that advanced yet. So you will hit the wall I mentioned in my first post much easier than you would using a different tool.

The table on http://www.deltaengine.n...eatures/frameworksupport explain which framework is used and works on each of the platforms and devices. Once you send your app through the Editor AppBuilder to our Cloud Services we will automatically convert it to make it fit to the target platform (so for example XNA code becomes OpenGL ES code for Android). Obviously if you do something that we do not support (e.g. with XNA or something that only runs on Windows by using some library) we cannot convert that code in the cloud and more work is needed from your side to make it work. That is the reason why it is best not to do too much low level fiddling as it will destroy your multi-platform-ability.

Hi Halowars,
it seems you are misunderstanding some things. It's true that Delta supports XNA, OpenGL etc, but those frameworks are used when you build your app with the AppBuilder contained in the editor.
When you are creating a game with DE, you use the DE assemblies and after coding the game you can port it on every platform which delta supports.
About low level frameworks: Benjamin means with that when you are using for example DirectX directly instead of XNA because as you surely know, XNA is only a managed wrapper for DX so DX itself would be the low-level-framework and you need more work to achieve your goal.

I hope I could understand you and my answer can help you a bit. For more information I'm sure that benjamin will write his own notes soon.

To reiterate what others have said:

If you only want to code for Windows you can use anything you like. All included frameworks (XNA, OpenGL etc.) will work. So for the purposes of learning game coding in general you can work through riemer's tutorials just fine. I started with them myself and think they are excellent ^^

If you want your code to work on a platform other than Windows you will need to check the table on the page Benjamin linked; You will only be able to use the in-house features and third-party frameworks compatible with your desired platform.

For the maximum chance of universal compatibility use just the in-house assemblies like DeltaEngine.Rendering. 'Dropping down a level' to XNA or any of the others will, in general, stop it being cross-platform.

The point of DE is that you don't need to learn *any* of XNA/OpenGL/GLFW/MonoGame/OpenTK if you don't want to. That's what makes DE 'at a higher level' than all of them.

It's just like how you don't need to know anything about DirectX to code in XNA (but you could do it if you wanted); Likewise you don't need to know anything about XNA to code in DE (but you could do it if you wanted).

If you create a DE Sprite, you don't need to know that DE translates that into an XNA Sprite for Windows Phone and an OpenGL Sprite for Android etc. That can all be invisible to you. Just create the DE Sprite and it will work universally across all platforms!

(Not all of DE's in-house classes work everywhere right now - that's what the feature table is about. But eventually they all will. And most of the important classes like input, rendering, sound etc. work everywhere)

Thank you.

Now I understood many thing.

Is that right, it is impossible to make one game and I can convert it to all the platforms because of the different framework requirement, e.g I make something working using xna framework, than it is impossible to make that work on android/ios/... as xna doesn't support those. If I want those as well I have to do the whole thing again with the supported framework using openTK(it is the openGL ES 2, isn't it?)

Hi,

your baby is sitting always in the same child-seat (DeltaEngine) in the back of your car.
For the child it´s of no importance in which kind or type of car (Low-level API - DirectX, OpenGL ES, HTML5 ...) it is the backseat-driver.
It will always reach the destination (compiled application on the target platform - Android, Windows...) just knowing how to sit in the seat (utilize the DeltaEngine)
and pooping loudly.

Greets

Edited by user Saturday, February 1, 2014 1:27:03 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Yes you are right, I should forget any hidden frameworks for a while.
I tried delta. I chose xna where I had to chose in the editor, than i checked menus. I didn't really know what and how to use. I checked the sample games,but it didn't helped me to be familiar with the editor menus. Than I opened one of those source code, and I get confused, because I didn't really know how that could be easy to be written, which is one of the main points of delta engine(if I understood right). (I said in myself it’s ok it was written by the masters of game making, even the game looked not so complicated) Than I opened the source code of a created empty project(I also chose xna as framework). Than I frightened and became a bit sad when I saw that I get is even not similar to when I make a new XNA 4.0 project in Visual Studio(I have VS2010), and my xna tutorials also made with the normal xna construct. So in this case I don't really know how to follow that my tutorials says, as there are different lines and names. I downloaded a working xna sample game, I wanted to open it somehow with xna editor, but I couldn't as there isn't any possibility to browse that. Than I tried to copy all the xna files into the folder of new DE project (named the same like the xna game's) But nothnig happened.
I was very confused.

But I said that's ok, lets try the tutorials from this site.
But I stucked at the very beginning.
The first base tutorial is only how to change the background color, and there is the code, but I stuck there as I don't know where I need to write that, because I found a similar part of this in the source code, and I tried to paste in in the right way, but it didn't worked.
It was the line given in Visual Studio: "new ColorChanger(Resolve<Window>());" And this is the line I should write: "Resolve<Window>().BackgroundColor = Color.CornflowerBlue;" I tried to combinate them but it didn't work. I tried to use the helper(Ctrl+Space) but I couldn't do that tha Basic tutorial 1 wanted.

So I trys to accept that I can’t do anything with xna and with my tutorials, as PG adviced.
I think I will be able to use xna tutorials after I could do some working apps without them and I understand how to use.
But in this case I don't know anything how to start. My first attempt failed, thats ok, lets try again, but I don't known in wich way I should start again.

Thanks. I didn't find that video somehow. I hope those tutorials will answer almost most of my questions.
In tha timetable there is a 100+ tutorials goal but that is for march. It that tha same what you mentioned for the end of february.

Edited by user Tuesday, February 4, 2014 12:47:38 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

"Head First C#" is a really cool book and I initially learned C# with it.
XAML is a XML language to create GUIs in WPF, our Editor for example is using XAML.
The Delta Engine doesn't support converting XAML so it is not helpful for game development.

However, I still recommend you to read this book in order to get the basic concepts of C#.