Microsoft Shows Full 3D XNA Games On Windows Phone

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually.'"

Comments

In 6 Months

[bedouin]

MS Begins Selling Full 3D XNA Games; No One Notices.

Windows On Mobiles - Yet To Be Convinced

[pandrijeczko]

I'm all for giving Microsoft a chance with Windows Mobile 7 (or whatever they're calling it) but as someone who has used phones & gadgets running Android, Symbian & Apple embedded OSes, as well as various incarnations of Windows Mobile on HTC and iPAQ devices, I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices. The rest "just work", Windows devices need rebooting once a month or so, they sometimes slow to a crawl occasionally for no readily apparent reason & there always deployed far too bloated with no easy way of removing the trash you don't need.

On a slightly related topic, I've been a Linux and Windows guy for some years now and having just got hold of a HTC Hero phone (running Android), I've now finally been able to ditch MS ActiveSync and Outlook to the point where my desktop of choice can now be (Gentoo) Linux with the ability to run the same apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, etc.) equally well on Linux or XP - if Microsoft is serious about Windows Mobile then they have to stop tying users up to their own desktop OS and products just because they use a Windows-based mobile phone.

Re:Windows On Mobiles - Yet To Be Convinced

[Svartalf]

The "embedded" OS that they slapped their trademark on is rather not suitable for a large line of embedded tasks. Same goes for Embedded XP, etc. It's only sort-of useful on PDA's and somewhat painful at times on mobile phones. And, before you remark, I should point out that I do embedded development for a living.

I would have to concur with your assertion of "bias" on the GP poster's part, but I would say that the current crop of Maemo, Android, etc. phones do seem to work more along expected lines and seem to better match "just work" than most. The same could probably be said for the iPhone, but it's got it's own set of issues too.

As for "Outlook/Activesync integration", that may be a good thing for you, but for myself and a lot of other people, that's a negativ, not a positive- not that I think that any of the Android phones don't have conduits for that support, mind. It's also worth mentioning that there's an App Store for the Android, but it doesn't have a censorship board like the iPhone seems to have.

In the end, each is going to have their own opinions on this subject- and your ideas aren't going to mesh up with mine or most anyone else's on it.

Re:Is this spectacular?

[binarylarry]

Yeah, it's infinitely shittier.

Kudos to the moron who modded you insightful.

Re:Is this spectacular?

[binarylarry]

Actually, HotSpot is much more advanced internally than either Microsoft's or Mono's CLR implementation.

This is evidenced by the fact that HotSpot significantly outperforms them both on most independent benchmarks I've seen.

Static compilation is not a magical panache that bestows performance, in fact for most OO architectures it provides more of a hindrance than a boost.

Also, "CIL" is the intermediate language that the CLR executes, which is very, very similar to the Java bytecode executed on a JVM. Comparing CIL to a Java VM makes no sense. Also, CIL is more or less a marketing term, because if Microsoft called it ".NET bytecode that runs on the .NET virtual machine," it would be more obvious to newbies that .NET is primarily just a knockoff of Java that only runs on Microsoft platforms