Day 2

When I opened Visual Studio today, a new option was available: XNA Game Studio 4.0! I guess the program had to be restarted for this option to appear.

Creating a new XNA game studio project in Visual Studio

Choosing 'Xbox 360 Game' creates a new project file. I was surprised to see the new file already comes with some code. It's not a lot of code though. I'm not sure what it does either.

Pre-existing code for XNA game studio projects.

Since there's so much pre-existing code, I don't think this is the best way to start learning C#. I might get confused about what I've done and what was already there when I started. I wonder what project type I should choose to get the least amount of pre-existing code?

I'm going to follow a tutorial where you make a pong game. It suggests you start with a Windows game (an option under XNA game studio). I guess if I made a xbox game I'd only be able to playtest it on an xbox? (And playtesting on the xbox requires a paid membership to the xbox creators' club)

A new problem. When I playtest the pre-existing code, I get an error message saying my graphics card isn't good enough (even though my laptop is less than 1 year old).

error message when trying to run a game using F5

Thankfully there's a solution, which I found here. It was to have the game use a 'Reach' profile instead of the default 'HiDef' profile. (Maybe my laptop can't run high definition graphics then?) This webpage has an easy walkthrough to set the game to Reach graphics.

The solution explorer

This may be a good time to look at the 'solution explorer'. A strange name for what seems to be a menu where you select different aspects of the game. The most important option appears to be Game1.cs and Program.cs, which is the code for the game.