As others have said it's not a good idea to start with XNA if you've never done any programming before. I can personally recommend the training videos at learnvisualstudio.net - you do need to pay but if you get a lifetime subscription it works out very cheap, and its not only C# training videos.The videos start from the very basics and move onto ...

Well from what I can see they appear to be well structured. I must admit I havent gone through them with a fine toothcomb but from what I did read it was good.They may be basic but they are reasonably clear and easy to follow. One trivial thing I would note is that in document 3 you list a Render() function then move onto explain it. I think it ...

Well if you have no programming skills at all you don't want to start with making any sort of game, you want to start right from the basics of C#.If you just want to make games without any programming skills then you should look into something like GameMaker or something similar.

Well we all know about version 2.0 so id imagine they were making progress on that - should be out towards the Christmas end of things so I hear, even some books (namely Riemers) have been delayed till January to take advantage of version 2.0

Yes of course, but if you had to ask whether it was possible then might I suggest you take a closer look at what XNA is before deciding on it as your development platform. You may find FPS Creator more to your liking, or I could be completely wrong which is also quite likely ;)

Then take six months to learn C#.

For the smoothing, wouldnt using a simplified version of bilinear filtering work ok for this? Take the average of so many points etc.E.g. Take the four nearest points/pixels to a location and interpolate between them to find the average height.

Final year at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK.Studying BSc(Hons) Software Engineering and currently on 12 months work placement, hence all the free time to read these forums ;)

Hi Richard,It looks as though you had roughly the same idea as me with regards to final year projects, XNA really does open doors for that kind of thing. Anyway, with regards to worms style gameplay and destructable terrain you may find this interesting:LieroXNACheck out the video's, its very impressive - and from what I can gather it's only taken ...

Well I can't help you out with the first part, but I do remember seeing another post on the same subject so maybe have a quick browse through past posts (it wasnt long ago, last week maybe).As for the best format XNA only supports .fbx and .x out of the box, so if you were to use another type you'd have to write your own importer for that. I would ...