Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To Enable User-Created Xbox 360 Games
simoniker writes "Talking on the eve of its Gamefest event in Seattle, Microsoft has revealed XNA Game Studio Express, a new product which will allow indie developers and students to develop simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PC, and share their games to others in a new Xbox 360 'Creators Club'. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC, and will provide them with what's described as "Microsoft's next-generation platform for game development." In addition, by joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99, users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360, as well as access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress."
Now I can finally work on that "ringworld" game I've been kicking around in my head...
.... "Linux kernel"
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This sounded pretty cool, and then I hit the 'subscription fee'. Dang, man, what is it with these 'subscription fees' ? Ok, $99, actually $100 with a haircut, is not so terrible an amount, but is the value there? Seems like they would get more mileage out of this thing if they didn't charge an annual fee and just let folks work together.
This could be a killer feature.
:).
There's so many extremely simple games that are insanely fun multiplayer, and will probably never, ever be released as stand-alone games.
I'm still praying the Nintendo Wii will be opened up like this, but if it isn't, this might be what tips me over to XBOX 360. Programming for the Wii-controllers would be fun though, and I really, really want to play Pong with them
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
If this is anything like the UT2004 'Make Something Unreal' its quite possible that this is going to fragment the playing community into small non-viable sub-communities.
E.g. Alien Swarm has about 4 decent servers, and a community of 100 players.
But this seems like a good idea in many ways. I'm a bit taken aback that MicroSoft is doing something to let hobbists flex their creative muscle, especially in such a (relatively) open way. I mean, development for X-Box and PC? That's a pretty sweet deal.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure a lot of the games will probably suck eggs, but it might just turn out that we'd see some real innovation in design and concept with an infusion of fresh development blood. Because you never know, one of those hobbists/indie designers might crank out something good enough to either a) get picked up by an existing studio or b) generate enough interest from others to start up their own studio. Then it just becomes a matter of being a good enough businessman to keep things working.
Now, someone please extract the binary signing key from this "XNA Game Studio Express".
Not found any details on what this kit actually includes yet. Surely to some extent the kit already exists via the free Visual Studio 2005 Express and the DirectX SDK? Apart from perhaps extra documentation and maybe some base framework for building for the 360. Is it going to be much more than just that?
Developers, Developers, Developers.
The XNA site they have a FAQ that doesn't really address my big question: If you create a game using XNA and distribute it to the community, who owns it? Are you forced into a licensing agreement? If so, is it one closer to the GPL or Microsoft's? This is very interesting because Microsoft may be claiming publishing rights to these games in the TOS for XNA.
So it could be a standard American Idol style:
1) trick contestants into signing away all rights they have to their work
2) let the community decide who is the best
3) publish their work and profit!
If you have preliminary questions about the XBox 360, you can find it on their forums.
My work here is dung.
until now only studios that payed a high fee were able to program the consoles. The introduction of the Linux Development Kit for the PS2 (http://playstation2-linux.com/) was nice, but too restrictive for sharing your productions. Now everyone will have, at last, access to the hardware. And I'm sure people will not only develop games. Sony (and Nintendo) better counterattack to this, or they are going to loose quite a big chunk of market share.
I hate signatures
I have a few gimmick games that I'd like to release for a console, like MMOPONG, or a MMO Castle Builder.
God spoke to me.
indie developers and students
They're kidding, right? $99 to develop a game that only a handful of people might play, and as a student having no income. You could get a job though to pay the fee, but when would you have time to code? And what happens if you develop the next Geometry Wars? Do you own the rights to have it published or will Microsoft just pay you royalties (that probably wouldn't make you back your $99 either).
Here's a suggestion, set up a page on My Space with a link to, say, a File Planet for the binaries.
I'd never subject Blob and Conquer to this.
Summation 2
The current announcements don't seem to spell out that this is based on .NET, but I'm sure it is. Microsoft has mentioned before that getting .NET on the XBox 360 was part of XNA. Also, see this FiringSquad article. They mention that 95 to 99 percent of the code from the windows version of a game could be retained in the X360 version. Also:
Managed code seems like the only reasonable way to enforce this security.
What a great educational tool! What got me into programming was a kid was the fact that I could make games very similar in quality to my Atari games on our old 386. I wonder if they'll offer an API simple enough for beginners to pick up.
~Ben
Reminds me of things like HURG: http://www.nonowt.com/magfold/revsfol/hurg.html That was good fun in the day, would get a simple game going without much programming. Although I mostly found programming more fun than playing....
Am really impressed by this cool move from the Redmond's boys, but got a lot of questions over it. How will it bypass the anti-copy game protection? Will it be a true SDK with full access to all the key components or a crippled down OS with no ability to get the juice from the optical disk nor 3D CPUs like the SONY's attempt with the ps2?
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Does this open the pathway to the first home-brew gaming console viruses?
Instead of paying additional XBOX game developers a salary, MS is going to ask XBOX developers to pay *them*?
Brilliant. I'm going to start a company right away, and I'll make sure to hire lots of developers to pay me.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
hmmmmmm... waffles
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Well, I don't fully understand if you can just buy a developer kit and make an application to the XBOX 360, but doesn't this mean that it will become very easy to run homebrew and backups in the XBOX 360?
... depends on your perspective) bug that allowed to run any application.
Even if the code is digitally signed to the creator and Microsoft enforces him not to create these kind of applications, just look at what happened to the PSP, there were a bug in the PSP was exploited to make a patch to downgrade the firmware until a firmware that Sony itself had made with a nasty (or very nice
Now, you could just make a game and even without intention, that game could have a bug that could be exploited the same way on the XBOX 360 and really Microsoft couldn' prosecute someone just because that person is a bad coder an opened an exploit to the XBOX 360.
The comments in this thread show that, when MS does something good, Slashdot (with the exception of a few idiots) heaps on the praise.
That's the quote in the article that really disappoints me. MS's desire for control and fear of truly "opening" up the game market is a real hindrance here. It's an area where they could REALLY get the advantage over Sony. Since Sony's online offerings have always sucked and they're MUCH bigger control freaks than anyone else, they could NEVER compete with this program if MS opened it up and let the indies market directly to 360 users (with MS taking a percentage of each sale for their bandwidth costs and to help offset the 360 hardware costs).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... on how long it will take someone to make a program that wrecks 360s.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Make sure to give them "dumbed down" tools and only let people who pay you use the results. Call it the "Ricky Rat" Club or something. Prediction: another big xbox flop.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I didn't see it in the article, but is this fee a requirement in order to have your game published? It could be a model similar to how the MSDN subscriptions work. You can develop with the Visual Studio programs and tools without having an MSDN subscription, but it's there for you if you like. Just a thought....
A community-oriented lyrics site
There will remain the requirement to hack the box just to see if it can be done though ...
I don't keep up with XBox360 game development but is this a subtle hint by Microsoft to get more developerment on the Xbox360? Seriously, I don't know. I can see this as a tactic.
"If you don't develop more games, someone else will . . . maybe the gamers. And we'll get their games and their money. And your little dog, too!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
OK, i'm sick of this "PS3 has Linux and you can code out of the box!1!"
It isn't true.
Yes, the PS3 "runs" linux.
Embedded Linux.
You will never 'see' it. You will see a nice shiny PSP style XMB menu. You will not be able to
code a damn thing (legitimatly). Sony has never once said you would be able to. Stop spreading
old shot down rumors.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
From the XNA FAQ:
Q: How exactly can I share my 360 game to other 360 users? Will my game only be available to people with the XNA "Creators Club" subscription? Will it be available to all 360 users that have an Xbox Live account?
A: There is currently no supported way to share binaries on the Xbox 360. Currently, there are four requirements that must be met in order to share a game targeting Xbox 360 which is developed with XNA Game Studio Express.
1. The individual you are planning to share the game with must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club
2. The receiving user must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360
3. The receiving user must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC
4. The game project, including all source and content assets, must be shared with the receiving user. The receiving user then compiles and deploys the game to their Xbox 360.
Doesnt exactly sound like a barrel of laughs to distribute to friends etc...
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
Also, if you are going to whine about pricing, you may want to rethink arguing in favor of the PS3... ;-)
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Isn't it feasible that they have released this feature to try and kill the "I modded my XBox to make and play homebrew games" argument? I remember reading a while back that somebody once showed Bill Gates a modded XBox, with a couple homebrew games, a few emulators, and XBox Media Center on it, and his response was something along the lines of "how can we leverage this idea into future products?" Apparently, now they have.
This is really great, I might just use my PS3 savings for 360 if Sony won't follow through. I can just see indie companies coming with great innovative games competing the big publishers driving more innovation or atleast cost down. Them, plus a handful of those angelic-selfless coders contributing to the community with free games. Even ad-supported games will be more feasible - created by the corporations for promotions, etc. One problem 360 might face though is when companies would go after Microsoft about widespread copyright infringement brought upon the many spin-offs/rip-offs of games, or even using trademark characters of big publishers games etc.. Like say if I create a game called 'final fantasy 7 - new world' and use ff7 characters etc, and distribute it freely. Will I be facing square-enix lawyers the next day? And if this becomes rampant, will square-enix lawyers go after Microsoft. Anyways, I think Sony is in trouble.
It's easy to make fun of Ballmer, but remember that he's *exactly* right here. MS has always made the development tools cheap and available.
Many years ago, I worked in a university department that mostly ran OS/2. This was back in the days of the OS/2 Workplace Shell and NT 3.5- OS/2 was in many ways vastly more sophisticated than NT. Queue up NT4- I went by the campus bookstore one day to look at software.
Sitting on one shelf was the OS/2 dev kit. ~$500, academic price. Then you needed OS/2 with the TCP/IP stack, which was another $200. Both were in ugly boxes to boot.
The other shelf had Visual Studio C++. $99. Came with a *free*, *full* copy of NT4. Nice pretty box. I knew at that instant OS/2 was doomed. $99 is an impulse purchase, even for college students. Hey, why not give it a try? $700, not so much.
Let's move up to today. You've got this. You have Visual Studio Express: free. Student prices for VStudio are still dirt cheap, and my understanding is that the development kits for XBox aren't really all that much compared to Nintendo/Sony's.
MS gets it, or at least some small part of it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
> The financial cost is there because, psychologically, people who have a vested financial interest in something tend to follow through with it more often and more completely.
Haha. Nonsense. The financial cost is there because they want to make money of desperate fat people!
http://www.reeb.freeserve.co.uk
The immediate thought is to make a wrapper to run linux or signed code or maybe a bootloader to run commercial copied games (as if you can't already do that). But, you will probably be running your game on top of an existing MS environment instead of straight on the CPU like a commercial game. Still, such an engine would be quite complex, and as sure as we know Microsoft, there are bound to be many corner cases or unchecked buffers. This makes another fairly accessible product in which a flaw can be found which can be used to run native unsigned code. Maybe... one can always hope.
Yaroze was neither the only nor the first 'consumer' console dev kit, Develo from NEC and WonderWitch from Bandai predates it ( just to name a few ). All those "Microsoft/Apple/Linux/Whatever is a copycat!" stories are getting very old very fast ...
Check you're facts first ... ohh right, you don't have Wikipedia at Troll U =/
Chairface Chippendale?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Basically they just have to give you dev tools that support DirectX 10 - for Microsoft there is really no effort involved as they just tweak Visual Studio to support the 360 (which it probably already does).
The real question for me is the first, how will you actually be able to load games on your system and share them as well? I am assuming you'll have to share them through Live, but I wonder if you'll hvae to use the paid Live. It could well be that you would "share" it through Live even for testing it on your own 360, that way the signing process could be kept on Microsoft's servers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gamasutra
So, Sony has never once said you would be able to, except when they did.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Microsoft would think that is great! It would be even better if it became the dominent OS. Remember it will cost $99 EVERY year to run this game called 'Linux Kernel' on your Xbox. They have never been able to charge that much for their own OS.
Of course this may just be the beginning of the great PC lockdown. I suspected that the point of the XBOX was to move people away from the open PC architecture that we all know, to a closed architecture that they can control. It seemed obviouse. Make a closed x86 box, and sneak it into households as a console. This would avoid all of the nasty monopoly laws they would face if they started selling standard hardware at a loss in an attempt to control the hardware market.
When they switched to PPC, it appeared that my theory was wrong. But maybe not. Of course this could also play into the theory that Xbox has seriously hurt Windows. The reason being that a very large section of the PC buying pubic only needs windows for their games. Everything else they need is available on Linux. When MS bought a bunch of top game developers and moved them away from Windows and onto the Xbox, they lowered the value of Windows.
With apologies to Ford, Microsoft is making a pretty bold move by essentially embracing the homebrew community. Some may not want to pay the $99 bucks to be able to share their games, but this sure beats the heck out of the constant arms race that is usually waged between console makers and people want to run homebrew or pirated software. One could also argue though, that this is a desperate move by Microsoft to spur more Xbox 360 development. But given that Microsoft on the whole has always been developer friendly and makes some of the best development tools in the business (at least for Microsoft platforms), I suspect that this was always a part of their plan. For me personally, this is a dream come true! I've always wanted the chance to write something for a console, but the price in money, for professional kits, or effort, for the homebrew console scene, has been too great. I've twiddled a bit on the PC, but consoles are where the real action is right now.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Obviously the poster I was responding to who wanted to port linux cares. People who want to explore how the system really works care. And people who want to make games that compete with native running games will care too.
But me? I don't care -- I'm not likely to be using it.
Ian Ameline
... and mine will be called "Duke Nukem Forever"!
One of the consequences of FOSS is that now everyone wants everything for free. God forbid you pay for a library! What's with the sense of entitlement here?
MS has a brand image to keep with the Xbox. To allow unfettered distribution of homebrew is a disaster. Remember that there are certain types of content that MS would rather keep off Xboxes, even if it wasn't authorized or endorsed by MS. Adult games, games featuring direct explicit illegalities... knowing the internet and YouTube, we have an immense ability to create content that the Xbox brand does NOT want to be associated with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with MS wanting control of distribution, if only for this purpose alone.
So the idea will be to put a crutch on homebrew distribution, so that MS can pick the cream of the crop for official endorsement, and probably un-handicap the game for full XBLA distribution, free or otherwise. This will allow you and your buddies to have fun throwing pr0n and other shenanigans on the Xbox360, but disallow you from doing any real damage through mass distribution.
And what's with the "XP only" game development? It's the .NET Framework for cryin' out loud. *AND* it's Managed DirectX! This concerns Linux/UNIX zealots none. We're not talking about a C++ library for OpenGL here, this thing simply *cannot* run in 'nix. The Xbox360 runs DX only, and one of the concepts here is getting rid of complex C++ and throwing in simpler C#, none of these quite fit with 'nix eh (Mono doesn't count)?
Do you seriously think MS is intending on sucking $100/year out of every developer? Are you seriously believing that MS intends the subscription fee to be a profitable industry? There won't be enough devs out there for this to be anything but a drop in the bucket to MS. I suspect the fee is more of a barrier to entry requirement to keep your everyday kids out and encourage some serious development - without setting the price as high as to keep interested (and qualified) parties out.
Really looking forward to playing Xbox Media Center on a 360. The only real intellectual property problems with the original is it was only legal if you already had the compiler, which pretty much nobody had. But would I pay $100 a year for XBMC on a 360? Maybe, depends on how Sony handles the PS3 homebrew development.
I see where you're going, but "Iron Baking" reminds me waaay too much of my grandmother's biscuits and gravy.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
...they go and do something cool like this. Hope its not crippled somehow...
No no no,
It's "shared source" not "open source"
One of the nice things about this is that you shouldn't even _need_ a 360 to do initial development on. A moderately good gaming PC and a wired 360 controller ought to tide you over until you've decided whether it's time to pony up the $99 fee (eg, game is finished, time to optimize for the 360).
I think this is an absolutely phenomenal idea, and I'm very excited about doing some hobbyist development with it.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Show the 360 users a 360MC for the 360 that can play the media formats XBMC can play (i.e. all the stuff that microsoft cant or wont touch) and maybe they will give up trying to make a mod chip.
Oh and there needs to be MAME360 and MESS260 too to cover the emulation side (and with the power of the 360 CPUs you could certainly emulate anything with 8 and 16 bit CPUs including things like Neo-Geo and CPS2 that required too much memory and CPU for the original XBOX and probably a number of games using 32 bit CPUs too)
Provide those few apps in a way that doesnt require spending big bucks to play them and a sizable chunk of the "I want a mod chip to run homebrew code" market would be satisfied.
The way I see it, there is nothing preventing me from learning about best practices on developing for the 360, then making my game for the PC with complete 360 controller support and then when my game is done, then I can buy into this program to compile it on the 360 and debug from there. You don't have to develop the thing for the 360 exclusively. 99$ a year is cheap when Sony charges you 50K and Nintendo 2K for a development system. And last time I heard, the Linux kit for thePS2 had dreadfull support. On the other hand, what Microsoft is releasing is a free version of what the devs uses. There is going to be great support for this.
I can't wait to download it!
I should have figured this but.....
Thats what took them so long to release dev tools... they just needed to figure out how to price it.
What exactly would make you happy? Microsoft giving YOU $100 every month and providing backrubs for developing for 360?
Comment of the year
Actually, the article I saw said that templates for standard game types (i.e. fps's rpg's, etc.) would be included with the kit, GarageGames-style.
why all the hate?
did you guys say "oh great now we can have shitty mods" when the iD guys gave access to the WAD files?
How about when Valve let people have access to the half-life engine? Isn't counterstrike still the most played online game? I'm willing to bet that a serious portion of the half life cds have been sold just to play counterstrick.
What happened to the guys who made the Desert Combat mod for BF1942? Oh yeah, they got hired by the company and improved the game.
Look at the success of Xbox Live Arcade. You have a plethora of PC game developers making games and selling them on the Xbox system. These are all guys who could never make console games in the past.
MS made a bunch of tools to help developers make their PC games work on 360 and vice versa.
So now MS wants to let even more people in, and you guys bitch about it? Why because you have to pay $99? or because some kid will make a donkey kong clone with steve jobs and bill gates? or because you have to have a 360?
I'm willing to bet that some kick ass games come out as a result of this. Maybe some kid gets hired by a company and makes a truly kick ass game like Geometry Wars. Maybe some game comes out and gets noticed and picked up for Arcade. Who knows.
If you dont want to do it, keep the $99 in your pocket. But only good stuff can come out of this.
According to http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?Pos tID=633584&SiteID=1, you're forced to use .NET, no C/C++ allowed.
Now they're forcing the amateurs to use .NET, since the pros don't do it.
Oh please...
When slashdot starts using the actual Microsoft logo for Microsoft topics and the actual Windows logo for Windodws topics (rather than the Gates-Borge and Cracked Window icons), then I'll believe that slashdot gives MS a fair shake. MS and Windows topics are the only topics for which slashdot uses derogatory icons (or icons with editorial spin of any kind), and as long as that's the case, slashdot has no credibility regarding MS stories, and slashdot open proclaims that fact by using those immature icons.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
From the Microsoft XNA FAQ:
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed
It seems this is what Microsoft said that they were learning to embrace open source software!
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I was thinking about a Jackie-Chan style... use your environment to destroy your foes kind of game, aptly titled "house of flying chairs".
Thanks,
Leabre
In addition, by joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99, users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360, as well as access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress.
So let me get this straight.
Homebrew Developers are supposed to pay Microsoft for the priveledge of making new content for their system that will be given away for free but that Microsoft can claim when they list the number of titles available on their platform when they advertise to compete with the PS3?
I suppose that $99.00 per year is better than Sony is going to charge to develop for the PS3, but I don't think that this is any real reason to celebrate.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Clothing in Animal Crossing and emblems in Mario Kart don't count.
Nice post... but do you need to pay the $100 just to run software other people have coded in this platform? I seriously doubt it. What kind of homebrew game developer world is that where anyone who wants to run your game/app has to pay $100 a year to do so?
I think it's only $100 a year for the developers.
yes I have. I guess adding a cool military theme and a cool commander mode and way more vehicle support is not improving it. let me guess, you think they should have stayed with the WW2 theme right?
Does anyone else see the fact that Microsoft much like with Google's adsense with web developers, could capitalize off of game creators with advertising? Microsoft could implement their in-game advertising into this program, giving developers a small cut; which in the end means more money (for Microsoft and the developer), and more developer motivation. I think such a move could spell a tremendous new outlook to small game developement. Does anyone else see the same happening?
Even if Microsoft wanted to, Linux is not possible on the Xbox 360, at least without a new version of the hardware.
....... working without also signing them?
On the 360, the page table is managed by a hypervisor etched into ROM inside the CPU. A page is never marked as executable unless it has passed an RSA signature check. The kernel does not have the authority to mark a page as executable.
Sure, you could get the Linux kernel running, but how would you get bash, gcc, perl, ls, cp,
Microsoft's FAQ talks about C# only. Gee, what a surprise. I think this means that the dynamic recompiler is inside the hypervisor, since it can't be anywhere else. You can bet that all programs will have to be verifiable. Otherwise, exploits ahoy.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
And they had boothbabes at the gamefest party!!! I mean what more could you want of a game development framework??
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
I've been reading slashdot for a while, and while I find the groundless MS bashing (or groundless bashing of anything) tiresome, I'd have to say that if slashdot 'cleaned up' their icons, it would probably be an indicator to me that it's becoming a site I don't want to read any more. Having a sense of humour is not a failing.
Yes, there's a silly Borg picture of Bill Gates for MS stories. Deal with it.
... except it's not funny. No more than the "chair-throwing" jokes are that get posted into every goddamned thread. The Bill Gates as borg thing wasn't funny back in 1997 when it was first made, and it's certainly not funny now.
I think it's more likely that they made this set of icons in 1996 in Paint or some other crappy image editor, and they've been too lazy to change any. That's why most of the icons are constantly out-of-date, and why they asked (when the site was being redesigned) that the new site fit in with the old icons.
Besides, I seem to recall that other companies that are constantly ridiculed (like SCO) have normal logo icons. Why does Microsoft get the special treatment?
Comment of the year