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XNA Game Studio Express Beta Now Available

Posted by Zonk on from the that'll-learn-ya dept.

d.3.l.t.r.3.3 writes "The long awaited XNA Game Studio Express public Beta is finally here. Despite some high claims by Microsoft, the Game Studio remains a code-only experience, with a more coherent and less fragmented feature set than the old DirectX 9 SDK. As I describe in this review, XNA has successfully streamlined many dull tasks of game development (helped a bit by the new game-supportive features of Windows Vista). It's also, unfortunately, kept too many frustrating pieces and bugs (especially when it comes to cross platform input handling and audio) to be successfully considered a real multi-platform game developing tool."

3 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I have to say I think this is a really good ide by DavidLeblond · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Cross platform as in PC/XBox 360 or cross platform as in PC/Mac/Linux.

    I think you can pretty much count out the latter. Unless there is a cross platform DirectX that no one knows about.

  2. People are too critical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Too many people are complaining that XNA is not easy enough, not visual enough. I just tried it and compared to the C++ implementation and even Managed DirectX in C# and all I have to say is that it is much cleaner and simpler to make anything.

    Non-programmers are currently trying it expecting something that would work like a drag and drop interface. They have been the loudest to complain because they cannot be bothered to learn to code a little C#.

  3. It's the former by everphilski · · Score: 2, Insightful

    PC/XBox360. But still, that's a big thing.

    If you want to do cross platform computers do OpenGL/(some windowing toolkit) ... but you will still have inconsistencies between each platform. Unfortunately.