XNA Game Studio Express Beta Now Available

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."

Comments

Re:I have to say I think this is a really good ide

[bangenge]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/this baby's just for windows. i would assume though, that eventually, they can port to the xbox360 with little fuss.

of course, being MS, they can create a whole lot of fuss about something so simple.

i was shocked reading TFA:

The shortcoming is evident if you run the sample included, a modern version of Spacewar. The game defaults on the joypad and you have to #define (yes, #define) a flag (USE_KEYBOARD) to allow the use of a Keyboard instead of a Joypad, crippling the "portability" of the game code. There's no way to transparently handle keyboard, mouse and joypad actions together unless you code it by hand. Frankly, in an era where even the lowliest mobile SDK has the functionality to completely abstract from the input device when writing game code, it is a bit discouraging don't see it in XNA.

a little bit too much of a mixed bag really. on one hand, it's great that a simple programmer (like me) can actually get to develop my own games for windows with as little fuss as possible *at least that's what i hope*. while on the other hand, if the TFA was to be believed, i guess i still have to wait. but kudos to MS for at least trying.