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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."
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.
This is a copy of a post I made on evil avatar. I figure people here might actually care. :)
.x files you've created and exported with an exporter provided with XNA (or using .fbx, which they plan to support). As it stands, the models are all in an undocumented bespoke format, for which there are no tools, so you'd have to follow the loading code and write your own converter, or write a bunch of code to support another format.
.x stuff to get some content in your game. Anyway, I look forward to checking out the next release, especially the content pipeline, which sounds very cool from what I've read about it.
I found it a little bit disappointing so far (I know it's a beta).
The biggest problem is that there is no content pipeline. Apparently this was due to be included, but got delayed until the next version. This would be less of a problem if they still had support for D3DX meshes, but they've removed all that stuff without replacing it. Since the content tools are coming soon (hopefully) I'm really not inclined to build my own temporary pipeline, and I seriously doubt people who are new to game programming want to mess about making pipeline tools when the whole point of this thing is to let them focus on making games.
You should be able to fire up the spacewar example and easily replace the ships with some
The documentation references DxTex and XACT, tools you need for all but simple textures, and for any kind of audio respectively, but they aren't included (as far as I can tell), so to get them, you need to get the full DirectX SDK as well. I can see DxTex being replaced by the content pipeline, but why isn't XACT included? Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I saw this thing as being an alternative to the full SDK, not complementary to it.
They call it 'XNA Game Studio', so I was expecting some IDE integration, with GPU debugging, or PIX integration, or anything DirectX related. Unfortunately it just seems to have added some new project wizards, and that's it.
The framework is pretty much the same as previous versions of Managed DirectX, with a whole lot of stuff ripped out, some new helper classes, and the rest cleaned up nicely.
I'm still excited about the XNA Framework and XNA GSE, and I can't fault the direction they are taking with this stuff. My main problem is that there's barely anything here that you can't do just as well with the old version of managed DirectX and the same copy of VC#, and with that you can at least use the
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#.
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.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
PC/XBox360. But still, that's a big thing.
... but you will still have inconsistencies between each platform. Unfortunately.
If you want to do cross platform computers do OpenGL/(some windowing toolkit)
There's no such thing as "a little code" even for us actual coders, much less in any gaming project, much less anything XNA-related.
A non-programmer shouldn't touch this stuff with a 12 meter (that's 39 and a half feet for us non-British people) pole.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!