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Microsoft Publishes Free XBox Development Tools
prostoalex writes "Microsoft announced the release of free XNA Game Studio Express tools for developing C# games that run on both Windows and XBox. They're also selling XNA Creators Club subscriptions, which, similar to MSDN subscriptions, offer access to sample code and additional documentation. Also, Microsoft is explicitly aiming towards uniting the Windows and XBox development platforms: 'You will have to compile the game once for each platform. In this release simply create a separate project for each platform and then compile them both. Our goal is to allow as much code as possible to be shared between those two projects, allowing you to use the same source files in both projects, but platform-specific code will need to be conditionally-compiled.'"
If you want to run the games on your own xbox, you need the "Creators Club" subscription...which costs $100/year.
So it's not quite free. And you can't distribute the games to others....unless you distribute the source and they are also members of the creator's club.
The Creator's Club is only necessary if you want the extra content/samples/support or if you want to run XNA games on an Xbox 360 (for now you'll have to have a Creator's Club membership even if you only want to run others' code, but that should change in a future release). If you just want to build Windows games using XNA then there's no reason to get a Creator's Club subscription.
Unless you can run the linux kernel on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime.
Oh and someone would need to port it to C# too.
Those of us who haven't upgraded should note that this is only for the 360, not the regular Xbox.
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I would love to see Nintendo do something like this. I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.
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It's just you. I guess it might be technically possible to build a virtual machine on top of the .NET Framework Compact Edition which could then run Linux, but that's not anywhere near the same as running Linux on the Xbox 360.
This video on Channel9 shows off running a game on the Xbox. Pretty cool stuff.2 54
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=261
It strictly allows only non commercial development and no distribution including free over the net. There's is another commercial version that'll be released early next year but you still face the Microsoft bottle neck. You can't release commercial games unless they approve of them and take a health chunk of the profits. It'll allow you to develope for the Xbox 360 at a much lower risk but there are no guarentees you'll be able to release the game on Xbox 360. Microsoft still retains the final approval and demands their pound 'O fleash.
#include "creatorsclub.h"
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I'll get right on working on a version of Open Office that runs on the Xbox :-D Then I can use that incredibly fast direction pad to type my documents. Ooh and I could bring in my Xbox for powerpoint presentations at school and have some fun when I'm not using it for that! The possibilities are endless! You may think that's a dumb idea but have you looked at the public domain roms made from scratch by people in their basements for earlier consoles like SNES, Genesis, and N64? THEY SUCK! Regular people aren't very good at console programming I guess. Office it is! :-D
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Here is some interesting code, using C# and the pixel shader which draws fractals 60 times a second using the XBox GPU. Initially I was skeptical about coding games with managed code (like C#), but it looks like we will see some games written in .Net. The drawing underneath still gets done natively, but you will be insulated to some extent.
Interestingly, Mono is planning to bring XNA to other platforms. Hopefully we will see PS3 running XNA sometime soon (quite possible, since PS3 already runs Mono).
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From the FAQ:
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed
Seems even the Evil Empire has a sense of humour.
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I come from a low level graphics programming background. Having played around with the XNA betas that have been out for a while, I must say that XNA is probably the easiest way to get an amateur started with DirectX programming and game development. It seems almost like Microsoft is trying to get the grass roots hooked onto the platform so that the next generation of game programmers prefer the MS platform.
Oh, and people who compare XNA to game engines like Ogre are missing the point. XNA is not a game engine, it's more of a development tool/platform. It does come with lots of library code, but it's not a full-fledged game engine.
Absolutely correct. Think of XNA as MDX (Managed DirectX) version 2.0. Oh, and DirectInput is missing because that's being replaced by XInput. It's easier to work with, and will be the way of the future (DirectInput will still be supported in DirectX, of course, since DirectX strives hard to be backwards compatible across versions).
Which of those other toolkits can target Xbox 360? Which ones support .NET code (aside from Managed DirectX, which is superseded by XNA)? Of course toolkits exist for the PC. That has nothing at all to do with XNA.
The press release says that they're working on removing the Creator's Club requirement for playing XNA games.
The reason you need to be a member of the Creator's Club as of now is because of the XNA framework - a souped-up version of the .NET framework - that your games are built on top of. Your games won't run without it, which means anyone who wants to run your game needs it (i.e., be a member of the Creator's Club.)
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I think that the "Developers" chair-throwing speech is exactly why MS is #1. Other companies (especially OSS companies) need to get just as excited about supporting developers if they want anywhere near that kind of success.
The one thing that Microsoft does extremely well is document and provide tools to develop software for windows.(free tools such as visual c# express offer non-commercial developers a cheap IDE). It's why there is a much larger number of applications written for windows than for Unix like systems.
By applying the same principles to the Xbox 360 they might just find that more people use the system because of what they can do with it, not because of the numbers.
The applications make the system useful, not the other way around.
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We can see this transformation across corporate culture with the flood of web 2.0 software and services. It simply far more profitable to have your consumers produce the content that you service that it is to make content your self. This also shapes the traditional big budget game productions look at what EA is trying to do with Spore or the popularity of EverQuest like MMORPGs where participants produce experiences with each other under the domain of corporate context provider. These experiences are enriched by this appropriation and therefore accumulate social capital, and whats important to remember about capital is that is transferable.
Its only logical that microsoft will try to capitalize on the home-brew game community. When those high up in the corporate hierarchy were shown a moded xbox and the home-brew software library, their question was not how do we stomp this out rather it was how do we appropriate this into our business model.
The tragedy of corporate appropriation is the tendency to make things suck. For example by shifting around generated social capital (ie your coolness becomes our brand) Your youtube videos are 1.6 billion for a few people at the top and free hosting for those at the bottom.
As the service model integrates the qualities/coolness of free & user generated software with open APIs, customizable interfaces and in this case low cost "development kits", the qualities that made free software so desirable are appropriated and generally potentially crippled as generated social capital is siphoned off to disproportionately support the (relatively minor) contributions of a few at the top.
So we see the rise of free service models wikipedia, creative commons, participatory culture foundation, the linux platform etc. (they are still appropriated and ofcourse people profit disproportionate to their contributions but at least there are some structural qualities in place that limit the disproportional profitability such as the GPL, open platforms, copyleft etc. We should probably chose to participate in those spaces if possible or given circumstance and specific goals you decide to make content for microsoft/google/sony, that fine as long as you think about it first ;)
Although I personally am not interested in this, I know lots of other people are.
I dont see the "you need to buy the subscription thing to play games on your 360" or the "you need to compile from source" or the "managed code only" as that serious.
To me, the 2 biggest lacks is:
C# only. No managed C++ or other languages.
and the real big one: Programs written for the XBOX 360 cannot communicate with the outside world at all (i.e. no networking period). This is by far the biggest limitation of XNA Game Studio 360 IMO.
Since we're on the topic, I have a web site - www.threesixbox.com - dedicated to XNA projects. It already has a good number of user-submitted projects for you to try out, many of which have the source code that you can study and learn from. Currently all the projects a PC-based, so you don't need to be a member of the Creator's Club to try them out.
Even in the X-Box, you're talking to device drivers, not the hardware directly. That IS what you do with DirectX- it's call that because it bypassed many of the software layers in Windows so you could write games. That's supposed to be the big selling point of the X-Box lines is that you can write for XP and do a minimal amount of work to make a console port to the X-Box or X-Box360. Talking to the hardware directly means poking values into the registers on the GPU, etc. Something few of the developers do- and none on the X-Box/X-Box 360 They typically go through a library or device driver on all the consoles to begin with. You might have done development under a console target, so your mileage may vary- but what I know of things differs from what you just said by a lot.
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