What's the best .NET game development framework ?

Question

I have dabbled in the Microsoft XNA game development framework which seems quite good and just wondered if anyone has had any experience with the Dark GDK.NET from The Game Creators, or any others for that matter.

Any advice on which to get started with would be great.

Answer 1

I would say stick to XNA. It integrates well with VS, it has great community support, and you can also develop for the Xbox and the community games program.

Answer 2

XNA without a doubt. It has loads of abstractions around a lot of the painful lower level stuff other SDK's force you to deal with. And of course, VS & Xbox integration and the huge community help too!

Answer 3

For 3D games I'd suggest XNA (although it lacks support for fixed function pipelines, you'll have to write all shaders yourself.)

For 2D games, SDL.NET is a good choice, as it's comparatively easy.

Answer 4

Check out Unity3D. It supports three scripting languages:

• JavaScript
• C#
• Boo (a dialect of Python)

All the game logic runs on the open Source .NET platform Mono. Your game will work on a Mac, Windows, Wii, or even an iPhone.