Another method you can use is after you’ve created your highly detailed scene and rendered the beautiful images is to simplify the mesh and use that for the depth values and collision detection. I doubt if it’ll matter too much which language you use.

I think "Game Physics Engine Development" is a very good educational book, and its really easy to convert to C#.

If anyone is into RPGs and needs some game rules as a guide or something then I came across some Star Frontiers sites on the rpg web-ring that have the rules for download. And before the bull dogs latch on to my ***, Hasbro also seems to be ok with it.

The only issues I had was with references. Especially material references in the mesh (like the heal spell mesh in jim adam's rpg book), the app would just crash.

This site has some games that could have potential.

A Spice Girls fighting game kind of appeals to me. If you look at the girls individually you can come up with some real wacky power ups.

It doesn’t, I thought we were talking about C++ on .net. Download the Winforms samples from the tutorials section of the site, they use xna but the device set up should be similar to what you want. SlimDX might also be a better choice than MDX since it uses more up-to-date libraries.

You can try using buttons instead of text for a GUI, I’m sure there are a few tile mapping examples that can be used. You can also add a few text boxes to supply the name and a brief description of the item. Buttons are also easier to organise, vertically and horizontally. They can also add to the adventure, if a player sees that a button isn’t ...

Actually c++ works pretty well. They’ve implemented the stl templates, crt functions and win32 functions as managed code, if you don’t use safe mode then you can abuse it to your hearts content. If you want to use native dx then make sure you add a constructor and a finalizer to the class for proper cleanup, like: ~C() {     // dispose of ...

If you’re trying to marry up skinning and normal mapping then you might need to add the weights vertex channel name to “acceptableVertexChannelNames”, otherwise the animation weights will be filtered out.