Opening the xbox360...

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10458

 

Wow interesting, they're using the Torque engine. This is a nice step for M$. I guess they finally realize the market enjoys casual games also

~t

 

I just read that too. Very, very interesting development in many ways.

 

The best could be the usage of a real programming environment. No: we use the fancy language DubbelDabbel with our infamous editor LabbelLubbel like you see it so often...

 

It's a great idea--hopefully not too limited. (The CNN article I saw said it was for making "rudimentary" games.) And $99 per year is not my favorite: I don't like software-by-subscription.

 

"Interesting" is a bit too tame a word for this phenomenon. To see what it's like building with XNA, visit the below link and download and watch the XNAOverview.wmv video. It is long and boring, but well worth it for those who have never experienced the joys of programming using Microsoft tools.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...B1-9DC6-4894-87B4-47DE83396A0E&displaylang=en

 

So, if this new program can create X-Box games, but only runs on PC's, and Apple now uses Intel chips and will ship with boot camp, what would be the hurdles to having Unity compile games that will run on an X-box (maybe using some version of translation)?If Unity pro will create a Windows executable, it's feasable that X-Box deployment could happen somewhere down the road, no?

Continuing down that line of thought, wouldn't it be great to create X-Box games in Unity, download them from the 'Unity Game Store', sell your work to the world of drooling, overstimulated YouTube freaks all around the world and line Unity's pockets for expansion of the engine and the Unity... hegemony?

My god... we could conquer the world!!!

Hmmm....

 

This is very "interesting" indeed, a $99 subscription license to build casual games for XBOX 360. I'm having trouble playing the WMV to see exactly what is meant by a "casual" game develeopment studio. Mention is made of Torque's 2D engine and Shader language, and they also mention FBX compatibility... how complex of a game can you make with this thing? Also, it's unclear if these games can be sold and through which format (XBOX Live or DVD). Can anyone point me to some more informative links? This was also mentioned in the New York Times today, but they made it sound more like a consumer/hobbyist tool geared more towards the Mod community. I'm very curious if this truly enables independent game artists to distribute their games on the XBOX 360 and make money, or just an educational tool for people/students to get their feet wet inside the XBOX 360 environment.

 

Please don't be too curious -- try very hard to watch the video.

Don't be seduced by the press copy that talks about how nifty XNA might be. The grass is always greener on the other side... :wink:

 

I tried to watch the vid earlier but it stalled and now it looks like they took it down. Figures.

Microsoft. (sigh)

 

The thought of giving microsoft money for anything makes my skin crawl. I dont mind making games to use on PC's, but to hell with actually giving them MORE bling

 

I would freely pay a yearly fee to otee for free unity upgrades

Anyway the great Assimilator Billgatus will never see a buck from me again. I quited with Win 3.11 and thats it for me. If its someday back to pc, i will get a penguin farm.

And youll see me surprised if there isnt something fineprinted in the liscence that keeps the "civilian" from making money with microsofts "freely distributed" property...

 

It seems like each console of this generation with feature somekind of indie/retro love. It's a good selling point beside of the full price games and maybe some have children who wanted it too - things are often surprisingly simple ;O). Certainly positive expirience with games like Geometry Wars on Xbox's Arcade Live did their own to promote this.

Some are more, some are less restrictive but i think it's good and in a long term perspective this will be less restrictive. After they've realised a distribuiton channel for these kind of games it would be fantastic for indiegames: large userbase, defined platform, affordable, synergy effects for windows and xbox owners... a dream bringing you back to homebrew games like on the amiga in the early days.

Wonderful if they'll do it right!

 

The presentation linked seems to concentrate on XNA's content management tools which, I have to say, are pretty much the last thing most indie developers are going to be worried about. (If you have so much content that you need these kinds of tools to manage it, then you aren't an indie developer.)

When we put together "Prince of Destruction" it had something like 1400 maps (a map covered one screen) and perhaps 20 kinds of creature, 300 different objects, 1000 or so terrain tiles, and so forth. We managed this content using HyperCard, our Map Editor was written using MacApp 2.0, and we had a bunch of other tools written in C. This is a pretty complex indie game. The same game done in 3D would have more assets (e.g. even if it had exactly the same number of discrete game components, every object would be geometry + textures).

Similarly, when I put together an educational simulation called "Mission: Australia" it had something like 1700 pieces of spoken audio and thousands of terrain tiles ... I built testing code into the program itself which let me exercise every content option from the command line, generating a report as to any assets discovered to be missing and/or unused.

Any game with a bunch of content is going to require automation to manage the content. I really don't see Microsoft's argument that Perl scripts are less "robust" than any technology they've come up with. Personally, I'm sad HyperCard was abandoned -- it had to be the most stable piece of software I've ever used.

 

You did Prince of Destruction? I played that when I was twelve and loved it!

 

Hmmm, I'm very naive regarding the licensing costs of publishing a game onto one of the 3 major consoles. But I have to hope that a paradigm shift is coming with all 3 platforms offering downloadable games/content. Unfortunately this XNA studio seems like a half-baked attempt. Obviously none of them are going to offer a purely open architecture for anyone to freely distribute/sell their games over their proprietary networks, but it would certainly be nice to see the barrier lowered a little bit to allow for more independent and varied content (raise your hand if you're tired of seeing "Generic Sci-Fi FPS Sequel #32" being lauded as game of the year). With 2 of the platforms (not sure about Wii) offering hard drives with their consoles, other media such as movies/videos could also be distributed over their networks creating the "home entertainment hub" that both Sony and Microsoft are hoping for (in fact drooling over). If either one of these companies are smart enough to create an open market on their networks allowing people to access/distribute content outside of their proprietary closed systems then the future of independent media is certainly looking brighter. The era of the centralized media sphere is over, now we just have to make the big corporations realize this fact :wink:

 

I can see XNA expanding to including Xbox live distribution .... but only via with Microsoft retaining control over what is distributed and taking their cut in any possible profits or enforcing a freeware only distribution. They could not afford to relinquish control over the live network and allow distribution of content that they don't approve of.

However, wouldn't the pc development aspect allow a totally open distribution if you are just targetting that for your game ?

Despite not being a Microsoft fan XNA certainly sounds interesting, but I'm not going to get too carried away by what sounds like a build environment with some middleware libraries .... Unity it certainly isn't

Paul