Microsoft to open Xbox 360 to indies

[nodtveidt]

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx

Thoughts?

[bt]

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx

Thoughts?

MS announced this shortly after it was revealed that the Wii Dev Kits would be a lot more "reasonable" than those previously available ($2,000 as opposed to $20,000+).

Overall it is a good thing, but we will need to wait and see if MS allows distribution of "Homebrew" code before it's anything to get too excited about.

Of course, I do have to wonder how many people will buy an Xbox 360 thinking, yeah, I did some VB stuff, I'm suyre I can code for it!

-bt

[soco]

MS announced this shortly after it was revealed that the Wii Dev Kits would be a lot more "reasonable" than those previously available ($2,000 as opposed to $20,000+).

announced, yes, but this has been in the works for a long time as GarageGames already has some of 2d & 3d engines up and running on it. this rumour has been floating around for a while, and they've been dropping hints at doing this since the E3 before launch.

it'll be natively ran C# code at the moment, but being that most of the expensive work is handled in hardware, this shouldn't really negatively affect the way people develop for it. they're still looking into the distribution of these games through their community, but at the moment it's limited to sending the project and resources to friends. i'm sure MS will heavily monitor this for any Devil Dice quality games, as they've handed out lots of free devkits already.

i think it's a really good move. i'm pretty excited to try it, especially the whole XNA thing, which seems to be a lot nicer to use than DirectX in a lot of areas.

[soco]

oops. double post.

[nodtveidt]

Okay, I got a chance to mess around with XNA for a little bit last night after hodgepodging my way through an SP2 install and completing pwning old Bill Gates' strangulating ass. First impressions: weird. If you know C#, then you have an advantage but there's plenty more you've got to learn. The system takes care of a ton of initialization stuff for you ahead of time, but the problem is that it's difficult to understand just how to get started, as Microsoft's own tutorials don't even work, and example sourcecode from third parties thus far is uncommon and largely undocumented. I'm sure one better-versed than me with C# will have no problems with XNA.

[bt]

Okay, I got a chance to mess around with XNA for a little bit last night after hodgepodging my way through an SP2 install and completing pwning old Bill Gates' strangulating ass. First impressions: weird. If you know C#, then you have an advantage but there's plenty more you've got to learn. The system takes care of a ton of initialization stuff for you ahead of time, but the problem is that it's difficult to understand just how to get started, as Microsoft's own tutorials don't even work, and example sourcecode from third parties thus far is uncommon and largely undocumented. I'm sure one better-versed than me with C# will have no problems with XNA.

I have played around with XNA and found it to be rather impressive.  I am a bit diapponted that it only works with the free C# compiler (those of us who have the full Visual Studio suite should not have to install a second virtually identical copy of the compiler and IDE just to use XNA -- hopefully when it moves out of Beta this will be corrected).

Sprite handling (complete with rotation and scaling) are all easily done, scrolling backgrounds are a little more difficult, but not too much.

Overall, if you are looking for a way to get going on gaming creation on a modern system, then XNA is well worth the effort to learn (and C# looks really good on a resume).

-bt