Basic tutorials

Im trying to figure out how to establish a model as a locked camera target. Also Id like to add a jumping and gravity ability to it (3d sidescroller style) im trying to make a 3d game similar to strike-force heroes 2. I feel like im jumping straight in trial and error style there is no userbase and the documentation leaves out a lot of stuff. is there any tutorial?

And nobody answers posts either. I think ill come back later but im sticking with UE4 till i get some help

Things are actually a little bit up in the air with how Xenko will be moving forward right now (look up recent posts regarding license plan changes, etc.). There is a long awaited update supposedly coming out very soon, like maybe in another week. That is a ray of hope, though not much of one, but I look forward to checking it out anyway.

Unfortunately, Xenko does not have much going for it as far as basic (or advanced) tutorials, which is a real hurdle for people interested in using Xenko right now. It is a good engine, but I struggle to do all sorts of things using it because there are no real tutorials for it at all, and there is not a large enough community of users to be much help either. This is a common type of issue with new game engines, and it is often part of what ends up killing off many a new game engine with developer aspirations of becoming the next Unity or UE4. Using Xenko is supposedly very similar to using Unity, but if (like me) you are not very familiar with using Unity that is not much help. Why learn to use one game engine for the sake of learning to use another, especially when you are already using another game engine (UE4) entirely? Well, there are some good reasons, which is probably how you ended up being interested in using Xenko in the first place. Me too.

There is some possibility of Xenko eventually becoming an open source community project, the possibility of which was announced when recent Xenko user license plan changes were also announced. This could be a very good thing for Xenko, eventually, but no one on the outside looking in really knows what is going on. Support for Xenko by Silicone Studio appears to have faltered (at least somewhat), which means the expectation is it may no longer continue to be developed by them, or development will seriously slow, or they may stop developing it entirely. Other than the open source project possibility, most of this news is bad.

Even if Xenko were to become an open source community project (like, for example, Blender did years ago), that transition may take some time to occur, and continued development of the game engine would very likely be slowed - including development of good tutorials for the engine.

Because of all that, for now at least, I have had to stop trying to learn how to use Xenko, as much as I was digging it for what it is, for a project I am currently working on. That seems a shame, but that’s how things are for many of us interested in Xenko right now. Instead, I am looking at using either Unity or UE4. Both of those engines have their positives and negatives, but at least both have a wealth of tutorials for them covering all sorts of end user needs. Xenko just doesn’t have that. If it did, I and many others would probably be much more committed to using it and helping with its further development.

So it wasn’t just my imagination!!!

I wanted to move over to Xenko ages ago and when I looked at the Xenko for Unity users page it looked so similar that it looked like I was definitely coming over to Xenko… When they showed how to replace the OnCollisionEnter, OnCollisionStay and OnCollisionExit using a single function that uses await I wanted to jump up and down with excitement… Then they showed how to do a raycast and I just stared at the screen repeatedly asking myself “WTF is going on in that code?”

Since then i have looked at the code in the demo projects and wondered “Huh? Say what now? What’s this? What does that thing do? Where is this being called / called from?”. The resounding theme of my Xenko experience has been me asking “Huh?” on a nearly minute by minute basis…

I was wondering where to find “Getting started” tutorials that take someone with 0 Xenko experience and guides them towards a simple WASD and jump tutorial or something similarly simple rather than just giving me an entire project and making me wonder about all the stuff that derives from classes I have no idea what they are suppose to do or be…

Then I found a thread called “Basic tutorials” and I was very happy… Till i discovered it was someone asking 'Where can they be found?" and the only answer being “Yeah, umm, nowhere”

I REALLY want to quit Unity and move over to Xenko but I am thinking Unreal is looking mighty appealing right about now. I have no intention of using Blueprints and C++ is a big hurdle for me but one thing Unreal has going for it is that there is a lot of info on how to actually get started using it…

Sad really that I would prefer Xenko over Unreal after a decade of using Unity and now I am being pushed towards Unreal because of the most simple part of this engine: Getting started tutorials. :frowning:

I am convinced that the guys who made this engine are smart people and that the code is more complex than what I can imagine and a lot of clever people did a lot of smart things to bring a very technical system to the general public… only to tell them: “So this is the deep end. Enjoy or die. Hey, who’s turn is it to pay for drinks?”

Yes, Silicone Studio’s support, or apparent lack thereof, at times, is rather baffling. I like Xenko myself, but I definitely need some help learning it. Some tutorials and a highly active user community would help with that. It is understandable that with a fairly new engine the end user community would not be all that active yet, so some solid beginner tutorials would be helpful. There are a few, small tutorials now in Xenko’s documentation, but not all that much.

This seems to have something to do with Silicone Studio being a Japanese company, and the corporate culture over there just being different somehow when it comes to such things as tutorials and community support. Though, why that should be still doesn’t make any sense to me. Regardless, at the present time Xenko’s continued development may be put on hold, or at least greatly slowed, or there is even talk of there being an open source community project version of the engine.

But no one knows yet, as Silicone Studio doesn’t like to talk much about these things, so many of us who are using (or interested in using) Xenko have kind of had to put that interest in the engine on hold as well. Which is lame, as I think this engine has great potential, but that is just where things are right now. Xenko obviously did not take off with as much interest as Silicone Studio had initially hoped, so they are reassessing the whole project. That is understandable, but also seems shortsighted.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost. There is a major update coming out very soon, and hopefully an announcement regarding Xenko’s future, but I don’t think we are likely to see much more in tutorials for this engine to appear anytime soon - if ever.

I have been wondering about switching to either Unity or Unreal myself, which had both been on my radar anyway before my interest in Xenko began. But now, I am also looking at other options, like Godot 3.0, which now supports programing in C#, as well as a few other languages. It has also had a major update in the last several months, and continues to get small updates regularly because its open source community is large, growing and very active.

There are other options too, of course, but all of them, including Godot, all have their pluses and minuses, so making a final decision is a bit difficult. Godot is completely free though (MIT open source license), and has a lot of tutorials, as well as lots of supporting documentation and an active development community, so I will go ahead and check it out first. In the meantime I will also keep an eye out for what is happening with Xenko, Flax and other developing game engine’s of interest.

Wish me luck!

I’m already 50+ videos into my Unreal course. I taught myself C++ a while back but never used it so I did a refresher course of C++ so far. Strange that they never mentioned pointers or memory de/allocation in those first 40-odd videos…

I had actually forgotten how easy C++ actually is and that pointers and the lack of a garbage collector are the only real major headaches to take into account when moving from C# to C++ so yeah, I am absolutely gearing up to move over to Unreal.

One of the things that I loved about Xenko was that it is a Japanese product. Nihonjin otaku desu. Forgive me :stuck_out_tongue: but I want to get started with Xenko, not spend ages trying to figure out where or how to get started. Hell, the sample project didn’t compile and I had to Google it to learn why and how to fix it. The fact that my Visual Studio required components I don’t even know the purpose of and THAT is not even mentioned in the docs… the fact that I had to Google how to make the Xenko sample projects compile means that these projects are NOT adequate learning material so no matter how much of a Japanese fanboy I am this is going to take some time to get going with and that time means more time during which I am not earning an income so Xenko has to go. Really sad because I would STILL much rather prefer this than any other engine :frowning:

…and then an hour ago I watched the Unity Berlin keynote and OMG… Unity bloody rocks! Now to see if the stuff they showed off as working and saying will be available soon means “Soon within the next 3 years or so” . Their new animation system where you don’t have to blend animations any more and just tell the game “Look, there is a low object in front of me” and the character will automatically slide over it/ jump onto it or “Oh, I ran into a wall” and then automatically play a wall run animation or a run up and jump backwards away from the wall based purely on the angle… Having Unity handle your animations for you without you having to create blend trees… OMG!!! If this is released soon then I will be incredibly torn between leaving or not…

That AR system for facial animation capturing. OMG!!! Deal breaker! …ughghghg… but Unreal is juts better in everything else… :frowning: Damit. If only Xenko had better tutorials then I could shelf both Unity ad Unreal and just not care about either any more… but alas, now the choice has to be made… Sigh

was so excited to see answers but they killed me

Yeah, I too have just had to give up on Xenko, as I feel Silicone Studio themselves are doing. Why should I bother continuing having an interest in the engine if they don’t seem to, eh?

Sad, but it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened in the world of game engine development, so I will just get over it and move on.

So far, for my needs, I’ve really been digging learning and using the Godot engine, which really has an incredible community actively behind it. Godot 3’s 3D capabilities have really developed nicely. Good enough now for what I want to accomplish, while also being fairly easy to learn and use, and very capable of handling large projects without turning into a mess (yes, Unity, I’m looking at you when I say that).

I wouldn’t spread rumors as long as no facts have been released. As I have read in the developer chat, nobody is giving up on Xenko. Just all the legal stuff of the current changes take a lot of time.

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I would certainly not claim that the developers themselves have given up on Xenko, as I feel (and they themselves have stated before) that they are still very much behind Xenko. It is Silicone Studio’s part in all of this that concerns me the most. I think that concerns the developers too, but they can’t really make much in the way of public statements regarding that, at least not at this time. I get that, and don’t hold that against the developers, but I do hold that against Silicone Studio (rightly or wrongly), as they are the ones that seem to have been holding things up and changing the game plan (so to speak) in mid-gear, or mid-swing, or using whatever other mid-game, or mid-whatever analogy one prefers to use.

Everything could still turnout perfectly fine, and many of us may have wasted a lot of unnecessary time worrying about all of this stuff. I’m just not so sure because of the lack of useful communication, which has left us depending on less than dependable rumors. That in itself is a bad play on Silicone Studio’s part, especially at a time when Xenko was beginning to draw some interest, but still has a long way to go in developing a big, active, loyal, supportive community.

I just don’t like Silicone Studio’s management decisions as of late regarding Xenko. Those decisions have rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn’t far enough along in my investment into learning and using the game engine, so I don’t really lose anything (much) in cutting my losses and running for now. Later on, for my next project, if everything turns out okay with Xenko, I may be back to look at it again. But that will probably end up being a few years down the road, as that’s about how long I expect my current projects to be in development for.

I found some tutorials from the old days, where the engine was called Paradox engine.

It’s mentioned that the tutorials are old, but still valid.
I haven’t tested them though.

http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/Paradox-Game-Engine-Tutorial-Series.aspx

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This is just sad, man…

I posted a question asking “How do you find other Entities or Components on other entities like I do in Unity using the FindObjectOfType function”. Instead of answering me they just deleted the post instead… like asking that question was some sort of crime or it might turn people away from Xenko because it lacks such a basic function…

Been waiting for what feels forever to get an answer and today I find that I can’t find my post at all… Instead, I find your reply about tutorials written in 2015 before Xenko was even Xenko and THERE I found the answer I was looking for! It’s a bit long winded but at least it gets to where I want to be so cool, that means there is hope for the future…

…but what is sad is that it seems absolutely NOBODY who is using this engine today has any clue how to find other Entities in the scene and instead of saying so they would rather delete my post and hope nobody else ever wonders the same thing… yet someone from years back already posted how to do what nobody can do today. Sad is: What does that say about Xenko? :frowning:

So thanks FeatherLight. Those super old links of yours were very, very welcome indeed.

@JansenSensei isn’t this your question? http://answers.xenko.com/questions/3027/what-is-the-xenko-version-of-findobjectoftype.html

I am not sure what you mean by it being deleted.

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My apologies! I stand corrected!
forums.xenko != answers.xenko
That explains why I was able to find it the one day and not find it the other day.
Now I also know there are two places for me to look for answers! :smiley:
Thanks @dfkeenan

I’m planning on making some tutorials for the engine when I’m further along with my project. (Which is being made with Xenko)

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Any idea if the Xenko maintainers are working on any kind beginners tutorials with any estimated ETA?

This is just my (very long, apologies in advance) opinion, but probably the team should focus on creating a couple of basic, real-world tutorials (like how to create that FPS template from scratch) first to attract community, and after that, start working together with the community once it decides to invest in Xenko, in order to, all together make the engine as massive as it deserves to be. The reality is that very few people will decide to stay if there is no way to know how to start.

It’s all about psychology really. When somebody comes to Xenko, that person is probably trying to find the engine that s/he will be planning to use for the next X years, and being at early stages of liberation, it’s assumed that documentation will be scarce, so learning it will be even tougher (even more investment, even more risk, and with humans it’s ll about minimising risks), so when you arrive to an engine where you have absolutely no clue on how to proceed when starting from scratch, that’s usually a “move-on-from-here” only choice. Sure you can go on the basic examples and try to figure out how all that works, but not knowing how long it will take, practical people (everybody hates uncertainty and we are all in a rush, we all feel we have very little time to make the call of “which engine to choose” and start creating) will feel they could put that uncertain amount of time on actually learning from some other engines’ tutorials and start creating, and hopefully giving back to that engine’s community.

This situation is unfortunate because, under relatively easy-to-correct circumstances, Xenko would definitely have the leading edge on the MIT engines market since it’s coming from a commercially-supported origin, from a very well known company in the 3D world, and with a couple of real-world games already in production. So probably putting the time in creating some beginner tutorials even at the expense of delaying new features or stability, sounds like the way to go for a really promising engine that aims to be community driven. It doesn’t even need to be written tutorials, it could be youtube videos for a faster release. Once the community has the grasp of the engine it will be able to write documentation by itself. Take Jayanam’s video-tutorials for example (https://www.youtube.com/user/jayanamgames), they are very very simple, quick, and yet they produce something beautiful that will inspire you to continue exploring the engine

Sorry for this long dissertation. Hopefully it will inspire action. I mean no disrespect to the engine maintainers, since I know that the early stages of going open source must be daunting. I’m just sure that the secret recipe for creating a good community is giving people something to start with. After that the community will come and move on it’s own