XNA Game Studio Code Path

Xbox LIVE Indie Games is a really great service for distributing games for hobbyists and independent game developers, but the tools are still pretty basic. Most developers are rolling their own engines and it shows. Synapse Gaming has a rendering solution called SunBurn which is really nice, but it's just a rendering solution.

I think it'd be nice to see an XNA GS code path for Unity so that I could use it to make my games for Xbox 360. I think a price plan like the iPhone (use the free Unity but pay $400 for the XNA parts) would work really well here.

There are some technical hurdles, for sure, but I think it'd be a great way to really help that community while expanding the Unity brand.

 

http://download.unity3d.com/company/jobs/pdf/XBox360Programmer.pdf

there working on stuff like this but don't have someone to do it and people have asked before. just search on the forum.

 

It has also been said before that it will not work with XNA, but I don't remember why!

 

Well they require someone with strong C/C++ skills and as far as I know, XNA is C# only. I think most of Unity is probably written in C++ too, so I don't think XNA is an option. Technically, you can use C++ with XNA on Windows, but last I checked Microsoft only provide a C# compiler for XBox360. I guess that could change.

I also suspect that XBox360 publishing will have a similar price to Wii publishing, not IPhone publishing, but that's just my speculation.

 

no you can make things in c++ of for the 360.

and unity doesn't need to be changed to make stuff fro the 360 but your right they would most likey have to either create a compiler for it or write something to get it to work.

 

Yes, but that's not what I said. I said that Microsoft have not made available any XNA C++ compiler on the XBox 360.

 

oh sorry I thought you meant it the other way around.

 

because Unity does not want to rewrite the engine into C#

I DONT want Unity to do this - lol - soooo slow.....

Its better to go Xbox native code much faster!

 

But unless you have a native Xbox XDK you can't do anything with it. And 99% of people out there can't get one of those. So my idea is to see some sort of managed extension to the engine that will work for XNA Game Studio so that indies who can't get dev kits can still use Unity for the Xbox 360.

Like I said, I'm well aware that this is a big technical hurdle. I'm also aware that there isn't a big financial gain for Unity here. But this is the Wish List section and it'd be a dream come true if I could use Unity to produce a game for XBLIG.

 

Boy is this thread lost or what, you do know TorqueX is for the XBox 360 and has zero c# in it right? It is still all torque script and C++, all XBox coding is, is hooks into library sets and published services. I own TorqueX and am a registered XBox developer / publisher, just can't say under what or whom do to NDA's, but seriously, there is no profit in Unity going XBox'ish, up to them, but since anything can be written for it using a free C# 2008 version and had killer tutorials on how to accomplish this, it is rather pointless for them to go down that path.

I however, am not part of their team and have no input into that chaos.

 

Actually TorqueX is completely C#. That's the only way for it to work with XNA Game Studio. You can download it and see the DLL. It's completely managed code. If you are a registered developer, perhaps they have a Torque for Xbox 360 that is native code, but TorqueX is a managed game engine. Unfortunately their editor and engine are vastly inferior to Unity from my experience.

I don't see it that way. There are a lot of developers who simply don't have the time, knowledge, or desire to write a full 3D game engine. I mean, that's why Unity exists on any platform, right? So going this route opens up doors for more developers to get on board with Unity.

 

Those same tools and tutorials are available for Windows too. Do you think it was pointless for them to make Unity on Windows too?

 

I think it was pointless for Microsoft to make Vista. I was an advocate for Unity on Windows since the first time I used the product. It is just simply pointless for them to make their product for XBox 360 IMO, thats all.

 

I totally disagree. Unity is what XNA wants to be when it grows up.

I've been doing 3D for 15 years now and IMHO the Unity engine and editor is about three man-years of work to get going on XNA.

Now, it would really behoove MS to buy the Unity engine, kill the x-platform stuff, and make it DirectX only and provide it to XNA for $100 or so.

I can't believe I said that.

 

Just that XNA and the baby store will never grow up.
The so called "Indie Marketplace" was launched long ago, yet its still only available in a handfull of countries at all.
At its current "grow rate" you can wait till 2012 before it is an option at all (at that point it will become comparable to the iphone app store at launch).

The real market on the xbox are xbox live arcade and disc, those are the devs that are able to pay the license fees involved in a performant console technology.

 

It seems to me that this is not that much of a stretch since Unity is developed on top of Mono for .Net access on PC. XNA is just an extension of .Net. It's just more of the same library. There is already a project to allow the use of XNA for iPhone development by way of Mono. That project is called XNATouch. That open source developer already has several Creator's Club samples ported over to iPhone using XNA.

Allan

 

Not really. XNA is more of a managed .NET wrapper for DirectX; a successor to MDX (Managed DirectX). As such, moving to XNA is not such a simple matter, especially when you consider that the core Unity engine is written in C++ (its just the scripting that uses .Net languages).

 

Though it doesn't seem like it makes sense to happen, I'd be ecstatic if there was some Unity/XNA compatibility.

I'll end up playing with XNA anyways. But it would be fun to use my favorite tool to do it.

I don't really look at XNA as a market. I look at it more as a really cool way to play with my hobby.

I'd love to share even simple games with my friends over XBOX Live.

 

For the record, Unity is not built on top of Mono but that Mono is built into Unity (that is a big difference). Most thing that deal with rendering and other lower game engine stuff is done in C++.

 

Why not get an XNA engine? They are tons out-there. ^^
Keep dreaming Unity will not be ported to XNA. lol
However, Unity will support X360 soon, provably this year. But still an C++ port of the engine, and you need a dev kit to get your hands on it. What could be cool is that knowing Unity multiplatform support, you can create prototypes and look for an X360 Live arcade publisher, porting your Unity game into Unity 360 will not take that longer. I am quite sure is something similar as Unity to Unity Wii. You can debug stuff without need an Wii programmer, Unity handle lots of painfull stuff for you.