Free Xbox 360 Game Dev Tool!

[Arwin]

Like for PS3 Linux, we'll have to wait and see how much we are actually allowed to do. That said, everything in this regard is definitely (or rather literally, infinitely) better than nothing! Good development, imho.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I don't know if this was always planned, or a response to Sony's comments on allowing 'home brew' and 'open development', but either way hopefully both consoles look ot be wanting to embrace all developers and not just those with big bucks backing. I'd like to think it's a common solution to a common problem that both are wanting to address through the same, most practical method.

For smaller homebrew what devs would benefit from is tools. Your average hacker isn't going to get much out of the usual spaghetti code they can run on PCs. If hardware access is going to be limited to APIs (DX and PSGL) I'd like to know what access will be enabled for the CPUs. Will advanced features (cache locking, writing for SPEs) be available or only appear as used by the compiler? I can see reasons to keep access to the likes of Flash and Java. What about use of peripherals? Getting homebrew onto the likes of XB360's camera using the Guesture Recognition libraries would be great for creative ideas, but will interfacing to that hardware be possible?

 

[Sethamin]

They are only offering C# and will only ever offer C# (or another .NET equivalent) because of the security model. In .NET you can constrain the user to the point that they are operating in a sandbox. Without this, you would be able to fully probe the address space and hardware and MS would never allow that to developers not under an NDA. Also, C# meets their design needs of a rapid application development environment, which is appropriate when targeting hobbyists.

Also everyone should recognize that MS cannot simply let homebrew apps be available to all 360 users for free (even under a different brand) because it could potentially break their business model. If there is enough software of high enough quality out there, people may opt out of buying games altogether and instead just download the homebrew software. That is a nightmare scenario for MS (and, indeed, any console manufacturer). While I agree it would almost never come to that, it's not difficult to imagine a scenario where it does begin to undermine their bottom line. That would be unacceptable. There are only two ways you'll ever see homebrew made available to the masses:

• MS monetizes it somehow, so that they get a cut out of every homebrew download.
• The best homebrew is picked up and published to Live Arcade or Marketplace.

I think the latter scenario is both extremely likely and a smart thing to do. The former could happen, but there's a lot of legalities and licensing involved which would probably preclude it from happening.

The "Creator's Club" thing seems to be a middle ground where they can monetize it somewhat. The subscription element of it guarantees a steady revenue stream and also lets them eliminate piracy, since it's tied to your Xbox Live account. Granted, the sharing scenarios are awkward, but I imagine they'll refine them more over time.

And people, let's not forget that even outside the 360 dev scenarios, MS is releasing a rapid application development environment (based on Visual Studio) for PC games with sample source code and everything absolutely free. Let's not let ourselves be blinded to that fact, because even in it's own right, that's pretty cool. Anything that lowers the barrier to entry for aspiring game developers is a good thing and will only produce better class of talent in the future. Can we not all agree on that?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

• MS monetizes it somehow, so that they get a cut out of every homebrew download.

That was always my understanding of how best to allow homebrew - let people write whatever they want with some limitations on hardware accessibility for security, but it can't be released onto any other machine except through the platform portal where it would be QA'd to a degree. The bottom line shouldn't be cut away from existing publishers because the costs in creating uber-titles is beyond homebrew, and if uber-titles decrease in popularity with people buying simpler games, the developers can switch tack and start developing those same types of games themselves.

 

[one]

If there is enough software of high enough quality out there, people may opt out of buying games altogether and instead just download the homebrew software. That is a nightmare scenario for MS (and, indeed, any console manufacturer).

For that matter the PS2 Linux Kit was a precedent.

 

[LightHeaven]

Having to get the source, and to compile and deploy and all the mambo jambo make it sounds really nerdy and troublesome and limit its appeal.

According to XNA Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/

Thats a hole in the program, but hopefully it wont last long...

Aparently when users show subscribe, showing their support they will improve things a bit...

Edit: Theres a interesting tibid about perfomance there, Marble Blast Ultra was compeltely ported to use managed code using Xna, and yet it was if a much better perfomance than the one in XBLA...

 

[Titanio]

Edit: Theres a interesting tibid about perfomance there, Marble Blast Ultra was compeltely ported to use managed code using Xna, and yet it was if a much better perfomance than the one in XBLA...

Care to point out where it says that? As far as I can see there's no comment on performance there.

The GarageGames guys have talked about the issue a little, but they've provided no exact indication of how it compares. They've said they were surprised and pleased with the performance (having expected bad things, and they had some things to say about c# earlier apparently), but their head guy says he still prefers C++.

 

[LightHeaven]

Care to point out where it says that? As far as I can see there's no comment on performance there.

The GarageGames guys have talked about the issue a little, but they've provided no exact indication of how it compares. They've said they were surprised and pleased with the performance (having expected bad things, and they had some things to say about c# earlier apparently), but their head guy says he still prefers C++.

Uh sorry, i read it on other blog

Here it is:

Well, Garage Games to the rescue! They're offering Torque X, the Torque Engine for XNA, once XNA Game Studio Express goes into initial release this holiday (they might offer something sooner, but that's up to them). Here at Gamefest, they're demonstrating an XNA Framework-based version of Marble Blast Ultra, and you can't tell the difference, in terms of performance, between the original and the XNA version.

http://letskilldave.com/Default.aspx

Reading it now (i read it yesterday at sometime over midnight), i noticed they dont actually state if the perfomance change was indeed for the good, but he added the "between the original and the XNA version." later after someone commented...

 

[pipo]

Blog update: http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2006/08/25/724607.aspx

Last week we announced XNA Game Studio Express, which is a product that enables students and hobbyist game programmers to create games using C# that will run on both Windows and their Xbox 360. The XNA Framework is the set of .NET libraries that developers will code against to build their games. As we get closer to the beta, I wanted to take a few moments and explain three keys to understanding the XNA Framework—namely, the goals of the XNA Framework, what the XNA Framework is, and what it provides.