XNA Beta Released Today

By: Derek Yu

On: August 30th, 2006

Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express (beta) has been released today! As mentioned earlier, XNA Game Studio is a set of tools targeted at students and hobbyists who want to develop games for Windows and XBox 360.

With Express you can develop commercial titles for Windows only. In order to distribute your XBox games, both you and the person playing will need a “Creator’s Club” subscription ($99 for a year, $49 for four months). Next spring Microsoft will release the Professional edition which will allow you to sell your XBox games.

Hmmm, is XNA supposed to be like DNA, except, you know… X-treme? Like if you made a man out of pure Mountain Dew.

(Source: Joystiq)

Posted in Community, Developers, Xbox 360

Albert Lai

Mountain Dew tastes like pure suck. I think a man made of XNA would be like Samuel Jackson crossed with Chuck Norris crossed with Jet Li.
Dan MacDonald

I’m just about ready to buy an xbox for this. Though the current XNA release is only supported on XP. It’s hawt.
null

This sounds…really unexciting. You have to pay extra. And you’re not allowed to sell the games. And the only people that can play your games are the other people who paid to be in this program. And even if you were allowed to sell to the masses, you’d have to do so through Live, meaning that Microsoft gets to say yes or no to your game, and can dictate whatever profit-sharing arrangements they want. No thanks. I’ll stick to PC games, where you don’t need someone’s permission to publish.
Teeth

You can use the framework (for free) to make PC games. Everybody wins.
bv728

PC game releases are free; this is basically the new Managed DirectX framework, which lets you make windows in DirectX without 500 lines of code. For Live, they’re expecting people to pay the $99 for access to free/cheap middlewear is my impression, since you have to buy the full version anyway to publish games.
http://www.joy90.co.uk Moschops

I was turned off by the fact that it’s built around C#. Microsoft once again trying to ram a language down our throat that we don’t want or need.

If you’re working on PC you may as well stick to C++ and work with DirectX. If you’re a student looking to get into games I really can’t recommend C# at all.

I can understand why Mircosoft want to open the Xbox360 up to hobbyists in a controlled way. One of the arguments people have had for chipping or modding consoles in the past has been for the homebrew scene. By opening it up without the need to modding means the overal ‘security’ of the console remains in tact (i.e. controlled by MS).

It would however be impossible for Mircosoft to open it up for a free for all. Since without their certifaction to sell games and without the need of development hardware and sdks all of the development houses that have invested heavily for the kit and licenses will have been somewhat duped.

The fact that games on the consoles are heavily QA’d and have to be approved only leads to an improved quallity and as a buyer of such a game I know it’s going to behave as advertised. I don’t remember the last PC game I played that ran flawlessly without any glitches. By contrast, console titles are (generally) a lot more stable.

What we really need is a whole new console/computer that is designed not with homebrew in mind but for homebrew. Much like Andre LaMothe’s machine, only powerful enough to make people sit up and pay attention.
Dan MacDonald

C# is a perfectly fine language. It sort of takes programming and turns it into something someone who took one programming class at community college could probably muster.

If your intention is to open up a console to the masses it makes sense to do it in a managed envronament like C#. For one you can sandbox its execution on the 360 itself without worrying about exposing any more of the hardware then they have to. Coding against XNA in a managed environment means that you get that whole “write once run anywhere” thing java was always going on about.
Sure as as anywhere is an XBox 360, XP, or Vista.. but then again that’s pretty much everywhere. ;)