Microsoft gives the little people a chance.......

    well with Microsofts Gamefest start today(monday) it seems some major annoucments are to come. One big one with be the XNA framework. for those of you who are not developers/coders this most likley does not mean much BUT IT SHOULD.

    The XNA framework is a Direct X sub-set built on top of managed code aka c# , which is a high level programming language that spawned off delphi in early 2001. The reason this is a big thing is it will make creating games on the DX platform EASY... but thats not all that comes with the XNA framework, to start it will allow people to distribute there games to the xbox 360, of course you must pay a small fee of 99 bucks a year but the tools and framework are free and you get a place on the Xbox Live market which will do wonders for small time game devs that want to get there name out. a lot of people could argue that this will also allow for a lot of shitty stuff to start popping up, but if anyone is will to put the time to create an engine or a game from scratch there is no SDK here folks they should get the chance to show it off and let the players see if its crap.

    The other big annoucement will be the free tools, if any of you have used visual studio(anti-ms people kiss my ass VIM SUCKS BALLS)you will be familar with the tools as its a sub-set of there express line which is free. these tools will also allow remote debugging of your 360 games as well. I think this is a big step in the right direction for the small time developer.

    and yes I understand you anti-microsoft people out there I am sure are just bahing at this; I see this as the new shareware model of the future its what allowed games like quake, doom and companies like ID, 3D realms etc... to become what they are today. I think this will help in an industry that is hurting.

    here is some info

    http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/pres ... dioPR.mspx

    http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155590.ht ... ws;title;1

    http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/168 ... Gamers/p1/

    http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=10458

    http://today.reuters.com/news/articlene ... logyNews-3

    http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/ ... are14.html

    http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback138.html

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00002.html

    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/techn ... f=business

    http://news.com.com/Play+your+own+Xbox+ ... 04939.html


    http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0806/352510.html


    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060813-7490.html


    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 122D44.DTL

    http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/ ... 267974.htm

    I guess MS has just one-upped Valve on the Indie-developer-friendliness.

    But yeah, we are gonna see alot of shit games and not to mention endless match-3 games but the fun will be in finding the gems.

    well I think that the people who will be making these game are the people who see value in there idea.. I mean most MOD/Indie game never make it beyond a year and the ones who do I think should get a chance to become a little more well known. I mean we saw a lot of shitty shareware titles A LOT, but we also saw a lot of good ones and I think this will be the samething. I think we will see a good couple shinning starts and who knows maybe some of us will get out work up there

    And then Microsoft will publish it on XBLA out of the goodness of their heart. Being Microsoft, you'll recieve a fair publishing deal ensuring you won't get screwed out of your IP rights or money.

    Oh wait, that won't happen at all. They'll go Valve on your ass and strip you of your IP for below market value because you're new to the industry an don't know any better. If you try to talk to a lawyer first, they'll threaten to pull their offer for somebody else that is more willing to have their game published on XBLA. You'll walk away with a few grand. Microsoft will walk away with much more. And at the end of the day, they'll be an amusing Slashdot story that is forwarded around people's inboxes about how M$ screwed some young developer and how they should have known better.

    Quote from Fletch

    And then Microsoft will publish it on XBLA out of the goodness of their heart. Being Microsoft, you'll recieve a fair publishing deal ensuring you won't get screwed out of your IP rights or money.Oh wait, that won't happen at all. They'll go Valve on your ass and strip you of your IP for below market value because you're new to the industry an don't know any better. If you try to talk to a lawyer first, they'll threaten to pull their offer for somebody else that is more willing to have their game published on XBLA. You'll walk away with a few grand. Microsoft will walk away with much more. And at the end of the day, they'll be an amusing Slashdot story that is forwarded around people's inboxes about how M$ screwed some young developer and how they should have known better.

    Wow. I cant believe that this is posted in a windows-dominated game designer forum. I could believe that this forum would transform for one second into a Linux-Forum...

    Wfr, Sindwiller

    Quote from Sindwiller

    Wow. I cant believe that this is posted in a windows-dominated game designer forum. I could believe that this forum would transform for one second into a Linux-Forum...

    Wfr, Sindwiller

    you remind me of walter in the big lebowski always trying to make some connection to vietnam

    Quote from Fletch

    And then Microsoft will publish it on XBLA out of the goodness of their heart. Being Microsoft, you'll recieve a fair publishing deal ensuring you won't get screwed out of your IP rights or money.Oh wait, that won't happen at all. They'll go Valve on your ass and strip you of your IP for below market value because you're new to the industry an don't know any better. If you try to talk to a lawyer first, they'll threaten to pull their offer for somebody else that is more willing to have their game published on XBLA. You'll walk away with a few grand. Microsoft will walk away with much more. And at the end of the day, they'll be an amusing Slashdot story that is forwarded around people's inboxes about how M$ screwed some young developer and how they should have known better.

    Actually I'd imagine it would work just like the indiegame library on Steam, Darwinia, X3 Reunion et all or maybe more like Direct2Drive.

    Quote from Polaris

    Actually I'd imagine it would work just like the indiegame library on Steam, Darwinia, X3 Reunion et all or maybe more like Direct2Drive.

    You can imagine that. You'd still be wrong.

    Let's see how MS comes through on this one, Valve is doing some serious work to get their name out there, not to mention pulling teams in left and right

    Just to follow up on a conversation we had in the channel last night about how the cross-platform stuff from windows to the Xbox 360 works It was said that the 360 does not do a re-compile of the binary when it copied over since the FAQ claims that you would compile on windows and then copy over the binary. I was not convinced that this was the case because that’s just not how cross-platform coding works. You still have to re-compile the code on the specific platform. This is why we can't run native windows applications natively in Linux or why applications like Firefox etc... are compiled for the different platforms even though it all comes from the same code base.

    So in finding out the answer I e-mail a friend of mine who is a manager on the XNA team. According to him you send over the IL to the 360, and the JIT compiler takes control. for those of you who are not programmer oriented, JIT stands for Just in Time Compilation, its used in a good amount of programming languages; to name a few: LISP, LUA, PERL, VB.net. JIT is platform independent, AKA ByteCode for nothing specific, we send the IL to the Xbox 360 and what this allow for is at Runtime the compiler for that platform translates it into native code. Which would mean that it does recompile the binaries for the platform, when it’s moved to the Xbox 360.

    Not that anyone cares how this all works but I just thought I would let Cascade know he is WRONG, and just giving an insight to how the inner-working of the XNA framework and its cross-platform abilities 

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