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Microsoft Says PS3 Linux Not 'Competitive' To XNA

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the ignorance-is-bliss dept.

nz17 writes "Gamasutra has a preview of its upcoming interview with Dave Mitchell, Director of Marketing for Microsoft's Game Developer Group. In the interview Mitchell dismisses Linux on the PS3 as a game creators' solution and has said, 'What we [at XBox] are focused on doing is providing great tools at a free or low price point that are going to enable consumers to be absolutely successful at creating games for both the Windows and the Xbox 360 platforms.'"

3 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. He may be right by Blikkie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sad as it might sound, he could very well be right. Although linux may be very nice as a development tool, XNA is here and now, and already has hardware access, and is very affordable. No matter how much people may hate Microsoft, this is very possibly a good tool for indie game developers who want to create a console experience.

    1. Re:He may be right by Zero+Degrez · · Score: 5, Informative

      No. To everything.

      XNA is an input and graphics interface wrapper, like Direct X but sits 1 tier higher. It also provides some objects to store typical things every game engine designer has to write for a new game engine so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. It is NOT a template for 2D games. XNA is NOT a game engine. There is NO restriction on art content. You can include whatever models and textures you want. It's even a piece of cake to include vector and pixel shaders.

      In fact, the demo game provided with XNA is a 3D game. Styled like the old spacewars games. 3D and 2D are both easily doable on XNA. Why you may be seeing more 2D than 3D is simple. Indie game developers are not often artists, and it is far simpler to create a 45x45 animated gif of a player, than it is a 2 million polygon, parallax and normal mapped, skeletal player model. Not that 3D art needs to be nearly that complex...but in a 2D world, people don't expect the things they have become accustomed to after all the triple-A game titles, with the budget of a small Hollywood movie.

      If you indeed did "look into it" you saw a few screenshots and derived your judgment solely from that.

  2. Re:Well... by J-F+Mammet · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yep, it's been confirmed by Sony just a few days ago that at least for the moment RSX was locked out of PS3 Linux because of security concerns. That's a big disappointment, but it looks like the framebuffer device will be fast enough for HD videos. It's "just" a matter of someone optimizing ffmpeg for Cell I guess.
    For games though, it's a bad news. Let's hope Sony will update the hypervisor to allow RSX access for Linux.