I've written two games for XNA so far, and I'm still feeling things out. Both were 2D games so I didn't get too deep into shaders. One of XNA's big 'selling points' was it's content pipeline. Personally, I'm not too enthusiastic about it. It complicates things for me as I don't deal with very complex data. And during beta I ended up writing my own from scratch as the final pipeline wasn't released, so going through the whole process using my own resource manager was not bad at all, and in any other language you'd be doing this anyway. And in many ways I prefer Blitzmax's way of dealing with images, audio, and other content. It's not as 'dictating' as XNA but complete enough that it just comes down to me saying LoadImage() if I want knock up a quick app.
For me, I like C#. I also like the C# intellisense in the IDE. It seems more robust than C++, but maybe I don't have something correctly setup (plus I'm not too experience with C++ either). So the big two factors for me was the language and the IDE, because frankly I can't stand to use the blitzmax IDE on large projects. Blide is a very nice alternative though for those looking for a similar 'Visual Studio' Experience. Having your game run on a console is cool too, but you really can't do much else with it :\.
In the end, XNA by itself really doesn't offer that much more, and in some areas it's even lacking (only WAV support?!). There were definitely some moments when working with XNA I'd think to myself "Why didn't they just do it this way?" and "this way" meaning the way BMax does it. Right now, the way I see myself using XNA would probably be with TorqueX (again, I like C# more than torquescript). It's a neat engine and making a game with it is much faster than making some game starting with XNA templates.
For me, I like C#. I also like the C# intellisense in the IDE. It seems more robust than C++, but maybe I don't have something correctly setup (plus I'm not too experience with C++ either). So the big two factors for me was the language and the IDE, because frankly I can't stand to use the blitzmax IDE on large projects. Blide is a very nice alternative though for those looking for a similar 'Visual Studio' Experience. Having your game run on a console is cool too, but you really can't do much else with it :\.
In the end, XNA by itself really doesn't offer that much more, and in some areas it's even lacking (only WAV support?!). There were definitely some moments when working with XNA I'd think to myself "Why didn't they just do it this way?" and "this way" meaning the way BMax does it. Right now, the way I see myself using XNA would probably be with TorqueX (again, I like C# more than torquescript). It's a neat engine and making a game with it is much faster than making some game starting with XNA templates.