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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.'"
I've played 3D stuff on my Nokia for a few years now as well, but it's really primitive - unfiltered textures, very few polygons before it slows down to the crawl...
XNA is a managed (.NET), higher-level layer on top of D3D which is fairly powerful, and also portable between PC, Xbox360, Zune HD, and now WinPhone. I think it's the portability that is going to be played on most here. Now, you obviously aren't going to make MW2 or Dragon Age that way, but I hear casual games are also a big market on PCs these days...
3D on a phone isn't really the news here to be honest. It's the fact that it's done with XNA which means you can build for Windows, Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile with a negligible amount of per-platform code.
XNA like DirectX encompasses your graphics, math, audio libraries and so on so you can actually concentrate on writing the game, rather than writing code to support the creation of a game.
It's a good thing for those who just want to build games whatever the platform, because it means they get to use probably the easier professional grade development toolset yet, with a decent professional grade language, and then publish for 4 platforms from the start- 2 of which are pretty major.
The guy behind "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" released some stats lately stating he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week. With this news he can now port to Windows Mobile 7 phones.
If you just want to concentrate on writing game code, and would like to monetise that, it's probably the single best path for indies right now because you've got such a large potential userbase - Windows users (100s of millions), XBox 360 users (40mill), Windows 7 Phone users (potentially tens of millions), Zune users (all 4 of them).
I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really. Indies don't generally have the resources to create a massive multi-platform game from the off, and although XNA wont port straight to these platforms it does as I say provide indie developers an awesome and easy path to market. When they achieve success, porting to other platforms becomes less of a problem for them because they've got the income and experience needed to do it if they so choose. This is somewhat what happened with Popcap- they started out with just Flash and then Windows games, but their success was such that porting the likes of Bejewelled to every other possible platform became feasible to them.
Spectacular, no. Good thing? I'd say yes, particularly for indies.
I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really.
Well, given that XNA is basically .NET with DirectX bindings (and a few other libraries), someone should sequestrate Miguel de Icaza and punch him repeatedly in the face until he accepts to port XNA on his Mono in exchange of his liberation. In fact, given how wilfully he ported Silverlight into Moonlight, we might even skip the whole punching steps and let him do the port on his own.
More seriously : .NET CLR/DLR implementation .NET implementation (Silverlight) ported to Mono
- Mono is already a functional cross-platform
- Silverlight is already an example of some domain specific
- In case of DirectX calls being directly exposed in XNA, Wine project has already some DirectX to OpenGL/Pulse/et alii wrappers (lots of games are currently playable on Macs and Linux through Wine or Crossover)
- The biggest chunk for making a Mac/Linux XNA port would be adapting the XNA specific classes to Mono
This might indeed work : :-P)
- There are already efforts in that direction (which has already been successfully adapted on one Indie Project)
- I would definitely see a couple of "Google Summer of Code"-worthy projects to implement a few of the basics of this latest Windows Mobile-compatible XNA version.
- Cross-platfrom Mono/XNA means instant support on all opensource-friendly platforms: Android, Maemo, webOS, Beagleboard/OpenPandora/TouchBook, (OpenMoko
- That means that there could be also interest from the phone industry (specially the huge Android clan, but Palm has also shown interests efforts towards cross-platform development with their PDK)
- That means industry-backed salaries could be used for such a port making it an easier effort.
Though, regarding Apple support, don't expect it to run on anything but jail-broken iPhone/iPod/iPad, just like with Flash. Apple doesn't want you to run anything which was not approved by Steve-God-Himself before ending up on the AppStore.
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I know this might be flamebait, but.
Java SUCKS for gaming. I wish both Java and Flash would disappear from gaming completely. Neither Java or Flash (excl. Shockwave) were built for gaming. Someone needs to come up with a multi-platform gaming dev platform - and as much as I hate Microsoft, kudos for giving it a shot.
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>I just don't believe Windows is a suitable OS for embedded devices.
Err, "Windows" is a trademark. The code on your Win7 machine is not the code on your mobile phone.
>The rest "just work",
As someone who has spent years using palm, then danger/hiptop, then winmo, and now iphone, I can tell you that none of these "just work." You just have a double standard because youre biased.
While Im certainly not one to defend WinMo, my previous phone was a Treo with WinMo that did a lot of the things 5 years ago that people rave about with iphone/android. WinMo didnt have an app store, but apps were easily found on the internet. Many free and without the blessing of any censorship board. Not to mention, Outlook/Activesync integration.
It's true. Java is a language and a platform, .NET is a platform. In a lot of ways, .NET took the idea of Java and addressed some complaints, resulting in a better Java. No citation there, that's just opinion I see from time to time.
Java has an awful lot of segmentation due to all of the 3rd party stuff that was later integrated into Java, so multiple ways to do the same thing. .NET has a huge library and multiple ways to do the same thing, but it's all in the library - nothing external. So if you see some .NET code, you can bring it in (usually regardless of the language) and use it. Java has things like NetBeans running atop Swing - and NetBeans is both a platform and an IDE for other languages. Basically it was pieced together over 15 years, and it shows.
The biggest black eye in the face of Java is all of the complaints about performance. It's not inherently slow, but the underlying runtime allowed developers to do things like repeated string concatenation instead of using string builder, making the app way more sluggish than it needed to be. You can be an idiot in .NET, but they made things more efficient from the start, just as Java has improved performance. You can still be an idiot in Java, but it's harder now.
XNA is intended to be a gaming platform, whereas Java was intended to be general-purpose. I believe that makes Kooty-Sentinel (1291050) at least partly correct. XNA is one of those add-ons like NetBeans, so arguing about .NET vs. Java is kinda retarded.
There are Java-based gaming frameworks - many, in fact. so if you want to have a flame war, it should be XNA against [jMonkeyEngine | Jogre | Lightweight Java Game Library ], I'm sure there are others as well.
Did I mention Java is heavily segmented?