Thoughts on Microsoft Creator's Club/XNA

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I dunno - if you give people the tools, sure, 99% will be dross, but there's that 1% of awesome that slips through.

Like anything, most of it will be crap, but there are those that can spin that straw into gold.

FWIW, folks on the boards here have reported positively on C# - saying that it's a breeze to work with (wouldn't know, haven't tried it myself).

Generally, if we give people intuitive, powerful tools (and yes, they can always always always be more intuitive), they'll make great things.

 

I just see it as another avenue to discover new talent. As Miller said, a lot of it will be worthless, but there will be some who shine.

About XNA being C# based? It depends. For non-industry hopefuls who 'just want to make games' it provides powerful tools with a more streamlined language. For those who want to be professional it does not get across the message of the importance of C++ over C# currently in the industry, and that is what is important, IMO. Then again, those who love the C# language has years of experience over me, so I'm not that inclined to press my opinion.

About language learning curves? If users are defeated by a language they will be defeated in making a good game.

 

I think the key word in that is "currently".

 

I think it's a better idea than using the term "Microshaft".

No, since to make anything marketable is still a lot of work.

Probably - a lot of people get into game design through ye olden days things like BASIC and AMOS, and these days through using the editors that come with games. Anything that lets people mess around more easily if they want to dip a toe in is good, in my book.

Good game design is, sure. But then, making good movies is hard too. Making a shitty version of anything is a lot easier (hello, 99.9% of YouTube).

The PC side is free - you only need to pay to access big extra stuff like the Torque X engine, and to shunt your game onto your Xbox.

Personally I think it was great, because I already knew some limited C, so I picked it up really quickly. And it seems to me (a designer, btw) that most object-oriented languages share a lot of common ground, so it's all transferable skills.

I think, judging by your tone and the 'Microshaft' thing, that you wouldn't have liked XNA even if it made your Xbox poo gold bars.

 

Completly agree, you're being given what is essentially a completly free games development toolchain...free...thats no money, thats nothing...do you get that? How do you equate that with shafting?

With that FREE SDK you are able, assuming you have the skills to produce market quality product which you can either self publish or go through vaious channles opened by Microsoft or other publsihers. $99 and the couple of hundred for Torque are absolute peanuts, PEANUTS do you hear, when one considers the potential rewars of selling even a few hundred copies of your self penned opus.

Now, Microsoft may cock up a few things, but so do Sony and even Nintendo, but you need to drop the 'tude and realise that in the games industry, we have to make the best of what we've been given and start seeing the glass as half full.
And when the 'tude has been dropped you would do well to consider that Microsoft has done more to make access to the games industry far easier than the other 2 have.

Giving people access to development tools and potential outlets means anyone can do it, the uptake may very well be poor, becuse developing games is harder that people think it is, but it will produce a fair amount of content, just as the shareware and indie markets do now.

As for C#...well I don't like it all that much, but I've not really had time to use it properly and I'm a known luddite anyway, when I do start to use it properly that opinion may change, but others I know find it easy to get started and that after all is the main point.

 

I use C# a lot for doing tool development type stuff. I've got my nose wet with the XNA stuff too, and from what I've seen it's a really solid platform for developing stuff quickly.

Of course, the SDK is somewhat simplified, barring access to lower level stuff, and there is currently no support for versions of VS other than Express (I think support for other versions is on the roadmap, but don't quote me).

Again, that said it's FREE! And $99 / year is nothing to get remote XBox debugging!

 

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Apology accepted, but you are still missing the point. $99 is an absurdly small amount of money to get you access to an Xbox360 market, thats a console market, that's traditionllay closed to home developers.

It's just enough pocket monkey to stop the school games designers but not so much to stop someone who really want to see their efforts on a 360

When you consider how commited the "unauthorised" homebrew market is, in terms of, cost of mod chips, flash cards, prized early firmware PSP's etc you do start to see the market that's being targetted.


Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, give him a net....etc

Microsoft have quite genuinely given all those frustrated game devlopers out there a net..not the most efficient or effective, but a net capable of catching a fair sized fish if they put the effort in.

We'll see some absolutly crap content from it I have no doubt, but we'll also find the odd gem developed for nothing and raking in millions.

Sony and Nintendo however have of late made it even harder to get into the console development market unless you have an inside track and that will have put off a lot of people.

I don't always like MS products, I do kinda resent the near monopoly they have, but they do a lot of things right and this "potentiallly" could be a big one.

 

It's not free, it's $100 a year.

I like what Microsoft are doing with xna and C# though. Although 90% of people, probably more, will be wasting their money spending $100 a year to show their wares, because very few people will get past a spinning triangle.

 

well XNA is free, which allows you to do it all on your PC, the $99 is to allow you access to the download channels for your Xbox tweaking...so yes I'm wrong in once sense but right in another, and completly misguided in the next, and...ermm I'll go now

 

Yes the PC is free, and I'd advise people to make the game on PC for free and join the XNA club if and only if they make something worth showing to someone. Even then it's sketchy, why not show it on the PC?

Mind you there's enough people excited enough about seeing something on their xbox 360 that they made that the money is worthwhile, and I think it's kind of mean on Microsofts part for them to have to pay to do that on their own machine.

 

hmmm yeah I am in general agrement there....but they are still the 1st of the big three to allow you to tamper with your kit, (lets discount Sony's linux stuff as its rare and also pricey). I'm sure the $99 is a token to discourage those who are not completly commited, and wouldn't really be surprised to see it dropped if this bold experiment bears fruit.

I would also agree with working on your PC for free too, focus on getting a game that has something nice about it, if it's good enough it'll get picked up and ported to everything else soon enough.

 

Only if by that you mean free, and downloadable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Linux

 

Anything that helps further the business and allows creative people to get in, versus filling our ranks with more biz-school dropouts, Dot.Bomb stragglers, misguided fratboys and "wouldn't it be cool if..." idea parasites, is a GOOD THING, no matter who it comes from.

When I got into this 20-some-odd years ago, there was NOTHING. No XNA, NetYuroze, AMOS, STOS, Mods, nothing. If it weren't for a few magazines (Antic, Compute, Analog, Page6, etc) and one "computer class" @ summer camp (which my mother had to scrape together a helluv a lot more than $100 to send me to, and this was the early 80's), I would not have gotten into the business.

Every little bit helps and I applaud Microsoft's efforts, no matter what their motivations. On the PC, there's a TON of noise, so even if someone does something "cool/innovative/creative/insert-buzzword-here", it drowns. $100 is a small price to pay for such exposure and potential.

 

Ah I was thinking of the PS1/PS2 versions I wasn't aware of the PS3 versions. I recant all my statments and will retire to a nunnery forthwith.

 

I like it here can I stay?

Do they have a vacancy for a back scrubber?

 

Hell yeah! I really couldn't agree with you more - I'd have loved to have tools and opportunities like this when i was a kid and, even though I now do this stuff for a living, I still hope to scrape together enough spare time (away from work, sex, drugs and sausage rolls) to put something together with this as well.

Prior to this I was actually feeling kindof sorry for the next generation of youngsters eager to learn how to make their own games - sure they've got the magical tube-powered-internets, and you can quickly find articles and answers to pretty much any programming, maths or 3d question imaginable rather than having to invent it yourself, but it still seemed like a far higher barrier to entry than the days of AMOS, STOS, etc...

 

I think XNA is a great thing...especially for prototyping. And the money thing is for assets and other stuff too, not just to get the exe to the XBox.

From XNA Creators Club website (msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/bb219592.aspx):

So for someone that has absolutely no access to artists, etc., it's really great to get game assets as that's my main stumbling block for writing my own games. I think it can only help...

 

XNA is a nice tool for hobbyists and indies.

It's certainly not the sort of click & play "Game Maker" type software that I suspect a few total beginners were hoping for.

Memory management is still messy. There's garbage collection for managed types, but for textures and other unmanaged data you need to call Dispose() to free it. Calls to Dispose() end up cascading up your code's layers, as anything which has a texture or vertex buffer needs to be disposable, which in turn requires their owners to be disposable, etc. I actually missed C++. That shouldn't happen!

The Dispose idiom doesn't cater for shared data. I ended up implementing a kind of Boost shared_ptr for sharing IDisposable objects.

The Content Manager isn't suitable for games which share data between objects and don't want to load everything up front (because of the Dispose idiom). Probably a map from String/asset ID to Shared Disposable is better.

The "Game Component" idea is poorly thought out. What is a component? What about game state transitions, and how do components fit into my rendering strategy? I expect many people will end up rolling their own system.

There's no music support yet, and there's no low level audio support (yet, or ever?).

AFAIK, the Xbox 360 version requires that assets go through the content pipeline. Sucks if you want to use your existing asset formats or tools. Or if you want to use raw PNGs, Quake models, PAK files, etc. It may also mean no "mods" if you need to know about all your data files at build time.

Of course, none of these are deal-breakers for a small game or prototype, and they can mostly be worked around for a larger game. XNA is still in its infancy after all, so hopefully we'll see some kinks ironed out in future revisions.