interewting…
“Talking on the eve of its Gamefest event in Seattle, Microsoft has revealed XNA Game Studio Express, a new product which will allow indie developers and students to develop simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PC, and share their games to others in a new Xbox 360 ‘Creators Club’.”
Ok let’s get on that JVM port (don’t forget the games core APIs)!
from here http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060813-7490.html
[quote]Just as important, Mitchell stressed the application’s benefits for commercial developers as well. GarageGames, he reported, was able to port Marble Blast Ultra to the new framework in just two weeks. Now the game runs on both Windows and the Xbox 360 using the same code. “Write once, get two platforms,” he noted.
[/quote]
“Write once, …” I’m sure I’ve heard somthing like that before ;D
Write once, release to two platforms. Awesome.
That games dev toolkit will get downloaded a lot before people find that writing games, even with a clever toolkit, is hard and give up. But it will help indies get their stuff on consoles. Exactly the kind of thing we’ve been saying Java should do for the last few years really. A JVM on the PS2 and the XBox and it would have been one of the major games writing platforms by now. So it goes…
This may very well be the final piece in the puzzle that makes me convert over to C#…
[quote]This may very well be the final piece in the puzzle that makes me convert over to C#…
[/quote]
Ditto.
Kev
Are you serious ?
My game development urge is not that big, especially because the prospect of employment is nil in my country. Since independent development with no big ambitions is cheap I think I will stay with Java.
Let’s see 1 or 2 years from now, how things turn out to be.
Ditto.
[/quote]
Microsoft is ready for you… just bend over…
Heh, nice an open minded 
Actually, after seeing this I did a bit of reading around. Microsoft Game Developer comandments…
I think not.
Kev
Yes, I found those too. Although I think your ‘3’ is skewed - their faq only mentions MS looking at the final binary, not your ideas/IP (presumably to check you’re not doing anything malicious). ‘1’ I can live with, but ‘2’ kinda kills it.
There does seem to be the suggestion that eventually all live users will be able to download created games, but as I’m in no rush I can wait rather than jumping on now for something that might not happen.
[quote] 1. The individual you are planning to share the game with must be logged in to Xbox Live and have an active subscription to the XNA Creators Club
2. The receiving user must have downloaded the XNA Framework runtime environment for the Xbox 360
3. The receiving user must have XNA Game Studio Express installed on their own development PC
4. The game project, including all source and content assets, must be shared with the receiving user. The receiving user then compiles and deploys the game to their Xbox 360.
[/quote]
or in other words - useless
What a shame! I enjoy C#.
Me too. I only really use Java for games writing stuff now and I’ve mostly stuck with that because this place is good…
Actually, lately I haven’t done so much C# either- Ruby has been my major platform along with PHP when I can’t avoid it and I find myself having to learn Perl which is like having to sit next to the crazy hobo on the bus who is drinking out of a bottle in a brown paper bag and expounding loudly to no-one in particular.
I’m open minded about most things… but Microsoft has done too much harm to the industry I love for me to have any thing left for them but a good kick in the ass.
That and I spent the last two weeks debug C/C++ crap on Windows using COM and other Microsoft attrocities… with their Visual Studio 2005 - a large piece of shit thay call an IDE. Their development tools are mostly broken. The last two weeks was hell… and many of the problems I was forced to deal with basically can’t exist or never do exist with Java development.
The problem with Microsoft is really that they are so irresponsible and incompetent but they are in a position with their monoply where they have great responsibility to the industry.
That said, I do wonder if this announcement doesnt’ bring a JVM on XBox just a little bit closer to reality.
I’m more of the opinion that it might get us closer to a JVM on a Sony or Nintendo console. If this thing catches on with the right market segments, Sony and Nintendo may find themselves way behind the power curve without a similar deal.
C# is rising fast at Full Sail.
It looks like we’ll be adding it into the main curriculum.
Most of the lab instructors are already all over it.
…kinda sorry to see it happen I guess, all the things they are raging about is exactly why I use Java, but it just never made it in their space…
Is MS going to release dotNET framework on XBOX360, or do they support native c++ programs only?
I can see why C# is rising fast, it is a nice language, 10x easier native side binding, support many C/C++:ish features such as inout params, structs, sort of method pointers (delegates) and so on. Good example is porting a C++ game engine to C# and Java. It is faster and easier to clone using C# language. Java version requires so much more reengineering. Implementing a new engine from scratch is equal to both languages as it can be designed around language features.
It might be true(?) dotNET virtual machine is slower than JVM, but microsoft will study performance issues as time goes by.
I do only Java dailybasis and am happy with it (kind of used to live with it), but have done few smaller projects on C#. But newcomers choosing their first language…
If MS released dotNET framework on XBOX360 then even more small indie (hobby) projects would appear. Think about MSLive with full of www.miniclip.com “coffee-break at the office” games. I hope PS3Live indie markets provide us similar possibilities.
To be specific, I posted at Full Sail but…
C# is not rising fast elsewhere. See <a href="http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm>TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2006
MS released a beta of the XNA Game Studio today. Doesn’t allow you to run anything on a 360 yet, but it’ll produce games that can be run on a pc now, and should be a simple recompile to work on a 360.
I’ve only had a quick look, but what I’ve seen is impressive. They’ve managed to do what Sun have avoided doing all these years - not just get a VM on a console, but provide lots of good game-orientated libraries to simplify the low-level details while still letting you have lots of control if you really need to. And it’s all well documented too, and they’re already building up a community.
Sun have spent years dicking around and as a result I think MS have just signaled the begining of the end for Java game development.
Wow, don’t beat around the bush OT! 
From the XNA website:
One of the key goals is to make it easy to develop games using the XNA Framework that will run on both Windows and the Xbox 360. We want to make it easy for you to develop your Windows game, for example, and then easily create an Xbox 360 version of it. Our goal is to provide a set of APIs that are about 95% normalized across the two platforms.
Across two platforms, those being a Windows PC and a box that runs a derivative of a Windows 2000 kernel (yes, the XBox 360 uses a Win2K kernel). Both systems, which I might add, Microsoft develops and manufacturers. So yes, we have avoided losing billions of dollars to bring an XBox /360 competitor to market.
And, BTW, Microsoft will charge you for the privelage of developing for their platforms and if you thnk for a second that anyone will be able to just publish to the 360 as they please, well think again.
Get your XNA game running on Linux, OSX, mobile…oh…right…
Good luck developing your Windows games OT
-Chris