Question

I’m thinking about making a 3D point and click game, is it possible to make one in winforms or WPF? I don’t need any physics or anything all I need is to make the application render 3D objects. I know that I can use XNA but if I do then I will have to relearn almost everything again. My third approach would be to make the scenes in a 3D game engine and then print the screen and then load it as a image. Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

There’s a big difference between a 3D game, and just letting players interact with a rendered image.

Your approach of loading a pre-rendered image is possible to do in both Winforms and WPF. You would just need to capture click events on the image and check the location against your list of active areas. Then just handle what needed to be done, ie: move to the next area, activate item, etc.

Edit from comment:
It’s not so much which is friendlier. You can host an XNA viewport in Winforms/WPF. It’s more about how you want your game to work. If you never have moving 3D scenes, XNA is overkill, and images will work just fine.

If you want dynamic scenes, you’ll need to be able to render them on the fly. Then, XNA makes more sense. It is a lot more work though compared to just displaying images.