How to ensure that XNA succeeds

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How to ensure that XNA succeeds

fostering the non-commercial game developer community is a great idea. however I think it would be more effective if you:

1) allow sharing of binary versions of the games.

2) provide a place on XBL where developers can publish their games (in binary and/or source form, possibly with gotdotnet-style source control). build a community around the games: high-scores, forums, multiplayer, etc...

3) prodive a cheaper 'read-only' membership to the XNA club so non-developers can enjoy these homebrew games.

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How to ensure that XNA succeeds

  • Renan Souza

    grouper wrote:

    1) allow sharing of binary versions of the games.

    2) provide a place on XBL where developers can publish their games (in binary and/or source form, possibly with gotdotnet-style source control). build a community around the games: high-scores, forums, multiplayer, etc...

    3) prodive a cheaper 'read-only' membership to the XNA club so non-developers can enjoy these homebrew games.

    We definitely want to make all threee of those points happen, and we're working on ways to solve this. We LOVE to hear your input on this! There will definitely be a community site available by the time XNA Game Studio Express goes into initial launch. In the meantime, don't hesitate to visit the sites and blogs listed here:
    http://msdn.com/directx/community (several will have an XNA focus)


  • Laurent67

    1) is something the developers at MS know about and want to get addressed

    2 & 3 are things I think that we in the community need to work on get a central site setup for help and distrbution and reviews.

    Speaking of community you can check out Learn-XNA a very new site that will contain XNA news an soon more.



  • rocky_don

    Roger,

    Re: The GC in XNA on Xbox 360 -

    There were talks about this at Gamefest.

    The 360's port of .NET is based on the compact framework, so it doesn't use a generational collector. It uses the standard .NET CF garbage collection scheme, which is faster, but behaves somewhat differently than the PC. There are docs on msdn about the compact framework GC.

    -Reed

  • Janine_Whittaker

    > We definitely want to make all threee of those points happen

    great! here's another:

    4) alow professional developers to expose XNA-hooks in their games (if they want) so they can create modding communities around their games.

  • Rod Yager

    We are standardizing a component model around "XNA Components". Of our goals is to try and provide a standard platform for all middleware vendors to plug-in. The component model will be available in the Beta.

    aL



  • ssfftt

    I'm pretty sure the System.IO won't be available in the form it exists in the regular Framework. I've had a reply about writing data to the HDD and there are limitations on what you can do.

  • Dennis Wang

    grouper wrote:

    > We definitely want to make all threee of those points happen

    great! here's another:

    4) alow professional developers to expose XNA-hooks in their games (if they want) so they can create modding communities around their games.

    Wow, that would be so cool :D

  • n0n

    From what I understand the binaries need to be signed to run on your xbox right

    It would be nice if you could outline what it takes for a managed binary to run on the Xbox 360, then I'm pretty sure we will figure out a way to automate it.

    I was toying around with the idea of creating a simple gui for the xbox, where you can browse games (by querying some web service or whatever), then it will download the source code and compile it on your pc and deploy it back to your xbox. It shouldn't be too hard to accomplish. It would require that the .net framework on the xbox supports the System.Net namespace and System.IO, which I really hope it does :)

    Since the .net framework is deployed on the xbox 360, I would assume that the compilers are also there, which could make this whole ordeal trivial.

    One issue is code access security, which I'm not sure how the xbox deals with.

    What blows my mind is how you guys were able to port the framework (garbage collector, common language runtime and the libraries) over to the 360 in such a short period of time.

    Also, outlining the differences in the garbage collector on the 360 would be nice. (Size if the level 0 generation and so forth).

    Roger Larsen

  • alka_mehta

    Jim Perry wrote:
    I'm pretty sure the System.IO won't be available in the form it exists in the regular Framework. I've had a reply about writing data to the HDD and there are limitations on what you can do.

    I hope the only limitations is to where you can write / read. Having access to FileStream, TextWriter / Reader would be very nice.

    Roger Larsen
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