What's difference between Express and Professional?

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What's difference between Express and Professional?

I've installed the Express edition beta 1, but I have interesting to the Professional edition. I thought the Professional edition should have more classes than Express edition, but I've never seen any documentation to compare the class library of each edition. Could you tell me the differences of them, particularly about class library Or I'd be happy if I could find the reference manual of XNA Game Studio Professional on the net.

Thanks,

Hayashida

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What's difference between Express and Professional?

  • Hemant Hindlekar

    It looks to me like they intentionally removed useful functionality that was in DirectX so they could make you BUY something to write your own games that are more complex, so I'd start a trust fund if I were you...

  • Harkernator

    What features would that have

  • yxrkt

    Check out the XNA FAQ for the answer to this and other related questions:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/


    From the FAQ:


    Q: What’s the difference between XNA Game Studio Express, XNA Game Studio Pro and XNA Studio
    A: XNA Game Studio Express and XNA Game Studio Pro are related products targeting non-professional game developers and established professionals respectively. Both products integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio. XNA Game Studio Express is intended for the hobbyist/small development group and therefore designed to help create non-commercial games. XNA Game Studio Pro will include additional functionality such as libraries supporting Xbox Live (Achievements, Leaderboards, Multi-player) needed by professional game developers wishing to create commercial, signed titles. XNA Studio will implement enterprise wide solutions aimed at the production pipeline and process by which games are developed in large AAA studios.



    XNA Game Studio Express is still in beta and is expected to be released this holiday season. XNA Game Studio Professional is much further away from release. As such there is very little information currently available about the additional functionality that it offers over GSE (although if we're lucky, some XNA staff will jump in and spill a few beans :-) ).

  • Andy E

    Since we don't know what XNA Pro can do (at least I don't and I doubt anyone outside the XNA team/MS does) you can't really say they've removed anything from DirectX. Also, the cost provides access to functionality that doesn't exist in DirectX.

  • jerfoo

    What I'd like to see is something between the Express and Pro ones, kind of like Visual Studio Standard, (which is what I have,) is compared to VS Express and Pro.

  • Jarda Jirava

    See your other post.

    Oh, and you don't have to pay for XAct so you're still incorrect.



  • ehsan sadeghi

    Fine. Play a wav file in your game using XNA without creating an XACT project for it... It can't be done. You CAN do this in DirectX...

  • Chris.Stewart

    Well, I don't plan on writing 360 games, so the devkit stuff wouldn't matter to me. The ability to use it with something besides C# Express without having shell out lots of money would be nice. I'm sure there are a lot of non-professional developers that use non-Express versions of VS that don't develop console games that could benefit from whatever the 'extra' stuff might be included in any professional XNA implementation. At the risk of beating a dead horse, the lack of ability in the current iteration to create custom content importers for every asset EXCEPT for sound is a terrible idea.

  • enric vives

    EWSommer wrote:
    It looks to me like they intentionally removed useful functionality that was in DirectX so they could make you BUY something to write your own games that are more complex, so I'd start a trust fund if I were you...

    What do you have to buy that had functionality removed that was in DirectX Game Studio Express is free. Since nothing else has been shown, I call BS on this.



  • EsteemDE

    The FAQ states that the pro version will be for signed developers with dev kits, which kind of restricts who will ever be able to use it (and probably talk about it)...

    Q: What if I have an 360 Developer Kit – can I use the XNA Framework with a title that I intend to send through certification
    A:     We will be releasing XNA Game Studio Professional next year which will support the creation of commercial games on the Xbox 360 using an Xbox 360 developer kit.

    I would assume that lots of 'dangerous' things like native calls will be possible, hence the restriction. Of course we won't really know the score until the pro version is properly announced.

  • jimcjr

    EWSommer wrote:
    Well, I don't plan on writing 360 games, so the devkit stuff wouldn't matter to me. The ability to use it with something besides C# Express without having shell out lots of money would be nice.

    It's already been stated support for additional languages is planned for future versions. There's no way they could have done more than one language.

    EWSommer wrote:
    I'm sure there are a lot of non-professional developers that use non-Express versions of VS that don't develop console games that could benefit from whatever the 'extra' stuff might be included in any professional XNA implementation.

    Most of that "extra stuff" is for 360 development.



  • LAPM

    Has anyone found an answer to this question I am wondering the same thing and would like to just bypass the whole express thing altogether as well.

  • Martin Smith

    Again, beta software. At least wait until the full release to pass judgement.


  • Taliesin*

    True, it is free, but why not just add a function to the WaveBank/SoundBank classes to load a wav in and add it


    EDIT: Let's leave this in the other thread, since this one was about the cost of XNA pro... :D
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