I think David was expecting something else than what XNA is. And a part of this is probably because of the "false publicity" that MS give to XNA... announcing it as the perfect tool for hobbyists and beginners. It's not so easy to use, and it's much lower level than SDKs like TV3D.
I don't like some of the base classes of XNA like their SimpleEffect or their Mesh classes, so I made my own. It's fairly time consuming, and error-prone because it's the first time I've went so low-level in my code, but it does give you much better control over what you're doing. I'm handling my own automatically-feeded semantics in my shaders now, something I can't do in TV3D.
Also...It's not a SetPosition, but close : Matrix.CreateTranslation(...)
Everything is matrices in XNA, takes a while to get used to but it's just as fine.
The way I do it is by invoking the MSBuild compilation process from code. I hope they make it simpler in next XNA versions...
HI Zak, Hypno, Blind, DW and others who may remember me!
Been a long time
Anyways, I am pretty happy with XNA over all but my biggest pet peeve with it is the 3D Models loading at runtime. That and getting it to run in a windows forms envirmonment requires some 'hacking'
My way around the models was to have a seperate project that did the Content Pipeline bit and just copied the .xnb files over to my local data folder. Not really any different than coping over my .x files just an extra step or two in my workflow after doing an export out of the modelling software.
Though, in all honestly I would rather just use my .x files directly. /sigh
As for the camera class...took me about 1 hour to implment my own. But then I am also coding as a full time graphics developer so someone who was not deep into it already would probably have a harder time.
I am still using TV3D 6.2 though *gasp*
And I never regret it. TV3D has brought me a long way.
Not sure when I will be able to transition up to 6.5 for live code.
All in all I don't think XNA can compare to TV3D directly because they are differnt.
TV3D is an engine (game/graphics whatever semantics you want to apply) while XNA is a framework with which you can choose to build an Engine out of, or just build your Application out of the Framework direclty.
Both are good tools that in the end can usually accomplish the same job. They will just do it a bit differently.
-Cheers,
p
