Wait, you can make your own Xbox 360 Games?

Turns out, Microsoft can’t seem to wait until tomorrow.  The press releases are all out, and woah, we made an announcement!

Xna Game Studio Express?  The ability to make your own games for the Xbox 360 console?  Anyone and everyone?  Game programming on the console taught in a number of colleges?

Read more about things on these links:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-13XNAGameStudioPR.mspx
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6155590.html?tag=latestnews;title;1
http://editorials.teamxbox.com/xbox/1688/XNA-Game-Studio-Express-Power-to-the-Gamers/p1/
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10458

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/281098_software14.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/14/AR2006081400002.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/technology/14game.html?ref=business

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/08/13/national/a210122D44.DTL

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/breaking_news/15267974.htm

And sign up for the Windows beta here.

Shh.. We can’t tell anyone this yet.

Gamefest is tomorrow..

Much like Boyd (my boss) says on the XNA Team Blog, I am pretty surprised we’re here today and our announcement hasn’t been leaked yet.  Even if it was now, we’re half of a day away, so it probably wouldn’t matter anyway.

No, this doesn’t mean i’m leaking it now. :p

Although a decent number of observant people have already found things.

I can only hope everyone is as excited as I am after these next couple days. =)

Last weekday before Gamefest!

As the title implies, Gamefest is rapidly approaching.  It’s the last weekday before the conference starts next week.  Oh man, I am excited!

I’m not excited because I’m going though.  Truth be told, I’m not, even though it’s just a short drive away.  While I’m sure I would love actually being there, I have so many things to get done, I just can’t seem to pull myself away from work.  It’s pretty great being excited about what you’re doing at work.

Could it be that I’m excited because of things that will be said?  Seems likely.  I’ve seen the presentations, I’ve seen the demo’s, I know the announcements that will be made.  Shhh.. I shouldn’t say too much.  I’ve probably said too much already.

I’ve seen the future, and I can’t wait to talk about it.

Cornucopia of topics, redux…

So much has been going on, it’s hard to believe that it’s been since April since I made my last post.  Well, aside from being quite busy I was pretty annoyed at the spam I was getting before, so I guess a break was a good thing.

It’s been a while since i’ve posted though, and heck, Gamefest is right around the corner!  There are a number of presentations there covering Xna, and I’ve personally been hard at work getting ready for the conference.

In the meantime lots of other things have been happening.  David posted an entry that started a buzz thinking we were removing a lot of functionality.  I enjoy seeing the passion people display when talking about these things.  We’re trying real hard to develop a framework you’ll enjoy using.

Then you have people like the folks at Garage Games (they make the Torque engine) who are doing a session at gamefest.  They key quote from that one?

“GarageGames, in collaboration with the Microsoft XNA group, recently ported its full-featured game engine to managed code for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Xbox 360.”

Pretty exciting stuff there too.  Plus, maybe we’ll have new announcements.  That’s always exciting.

Then you have other randomness going on just in the world.  The other day I went out to Olive Garden for dinner.  The first 15minutes were spent waiting for a table, which wasn’t that bad.  It was pretty fast for Olive Garden, plus the most attractive woman I think i’ve seen was there waiting as well.  Everything went down hill from there.  While we were being seated a party of 9 showed up and were told they’d have approximately a 20minute wait.  That becomes important later in the story.

After 15 minutes of sitting down looking at the menu (really, it’s not that big), our waiter finally arrived to get our drink order (we already had our entire dinner planned out by then).. So we order everything.  10 minutes later our drinks arrive, one of them wrong.  5 minutes after that, our appetizers arrive. Those are wrong as well.  Oh, and one of them is missing completely.  So, it’s been 30 minutes, half our orders have been wrong, and we haven’t even gotten our main meal yet.  Good times!

15 minutes later the wait comes back and informs us that he had just left the kitchen and our food would be right out.  Good thing, we’re getting pretty hungry..  15 minutes later, he stopped back by the table.  He apologized profusely, but they are short two cooks, and the food will be right out.  He also asked if he could get us some more breadsticks.  We were pretty hungry, so we said sure.

15 minutes after that, he stopped by the table again.  He apologized some more.  It’s his first day, he’s overwhelmed (wait, I thought there cooks missing?)..  He doesn’t have our breadsticks, but we’re in luck.  Our food will be right out.  15 minutes after that, the manager comes to our table (he doesn’t have the breadsticks either) and apologizes.  But our food will be right out.

10 minutes later (100 minutes since we’ve arrived if you’re keepign track) our food finally arrives.  Yay!  Out of the four entrees we ordered only three show up, and two of them are wrong.  Another 10 minutes goes by before our final entree shows up.  It’s also wrong.  As our last entree arrives what do we see?  The party of 9, leaving.  They had already been seated, ordered, served, eaten, and were leaving.

After two hours of some of the worst service I’ve ever had the manager apologized a lot.  They gave us the meal for free and added a $50 gift card, but even then I wasn’t overly happy about it.  Crappy service is bad enough, but when the waiter is directly lying to us?  We never did get those breadsticks either.

ZMan also made sure people knew that he’ll cover the Xna Framework on his site once we go live as well.

I also noticed that Dave is “slowing down” his playing of World of Warcraft.  I had done the same thing due to a variety of factors, namely frustration with the end game, and the extreme amount of work I have to do.  I’ve been playing again more recently, and although I only have a small amount of time a day I can actually play, i’ve been enjoying myself again.  My current guild isn’t looking to do any big 40man raids, but we’re working our way into 20man content soon, and that’s good enough for us for now.  I’ve been playing on the Eitrigg server, and while I’ll probably regret this, feel free to stop by and say hi sometime..  You can see our guild forums @ http://www.darkcrusade.org

I must say.. I typed a lot more than I expected..  Now I guess I’ll crawl back into my hole and write some more code.. =)

So you wanna be a game developer?

(I’m gonna copy/paste since i’m in a lazy mood)

Are you a hobby, casual or Indie game developer? If so, we’re looking for participants in a usability study which will help us build better products and technologies to help serve your needs in this area.

Participation criteria:

  • You must have been actively involved in programming games within the past year.
  • You must be a student, hobbyist (meaning you develop games for fun), or Indie game developer. For this particular study we are not considering professional game developers who work at established studios unless you also develop games for fun outside of work.
  • For this particular study we are looking for participants who reside within 30 miles of Seattle, Washington.

Users who are interested in participating in the study and meet the criteria above should complete our short (5-10 minutes) survey here:

http://www.developersurvey.com/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?s=F418DF772FE24D96A1A38F3BDCD4131A

Once we receive survey responses we will begin contacting the candidates if they meet our selection criteria.

Thanks!

According to Amazon, I had a new book come out this week!

If the title didn’t give it away, I regret to inform you that I didn’t.

I’m sure everyone is aware that a long time ago I had signed up for writing a 3rd book.. A more “advanced” game programming book that took an already completed game I had written, disected it, and showed the techniques I used, etc.  Once it became apparent to me that I wouldn’t have the time for that, I left that project off in good hands with a co-worker and friend Rick.

Now, more recently I was asked about updating my quite popular Kickstart book with a second edition.  The goal there being to add more content for the new API’s, and update the book to the latest versions.  At the time this was being discussed it was the early days of what would become MDX2, and I decided that should be the focus of this second edition.

So, both of these projects were designed to run with CLR2 and MDX2.  As I’m sure everyone is aware now, MDX2 is evolving into the XNA Framework, which is delaying (yet again) each of these projects.

So, despite what Amazon says, to my knowledge there is no “new” Managed DirectX book coming out this week.  Certainly not one from me.  Plus, with the XNA Framework, a “Managed DirectX Kickstart” second edition doesn’t seem as logical (second edition of a first run product?) so that seems likely to change as well..

MDX1 or MDX2.. That is the question..

At least, it’s been the question people have been asking me quite a bit.  Given we haven’t announced the availability of the XNA Framework yet, but we have announced that MDX2 is a “technology preview”, but will never ship in a “released” mode, the answer seems relatively straight forward to me.

If you are shipping something that needs to be “released” by a particular date, you’ll probably want to be using MDX1, as it is already released and available.  If you have a project that isn’t tied to any strong dates and you can wait for us to ship the XNA Framework, you can stick with whatever you’re using right now, be it MDX1 or MDX2.

The question is somewhat more complicated if you fall into the former, but the “particular date” is say a year out.  Then it becomes more of a business decision for you.  “Can I risk sticking with MDX2/XNA Framework with no guarantees it would be out within a year.”  If you can’t, then you should probably be using MDX1..

You can thank whoever decided my blog was spam worthy…

From this point on all comments require my approval before they are posted, and if the 200+ comments I just had to delete/moderate on that last post are any indication, you can expect a lot less posts from me because frankly, I don’t have the time for that crap.

I apologize that the “few” will be ruining it for the “many”.

Why does everyone seem to think the XNA Framework is only XBox?

In the comments section of my last post (not including the april fools joke) many people are talking about how MDX2 is ‘dead’ and they can’t afford an XBox dev kit, etc..

I’m not entirely sure where the confusion of ideas has come from.  The XNA Framework is going to be cross platform.  This means that it will run on Windows.  XBox 360 (and thus development kits) is not a requirement for using the framework at all.  You will be able to use the framework and write games for Windows even if you’ve never seen an Xbox 360 before.

While MDX2 as a name may be “dead”, many of the API’s in the framework will look quite familiar to developers who have used MDX2.  I also enjoy reading everyone discussing how much things are going to cost ignoring the facts that:

  • We haven’t said anything about availability or pricing
  • The DirectX SDK is already free

Everyone seems to be getting all up in arms by jumping to conclusions, and making a lot of bold assumptions.  At least let us announce our plans,etc before you go off predicting such doomsday scenarios..

Before you ask, no, I’m not aware of when we’ll be announcing more of the plans.  So I guess everyone will continue to assume the worst until we either verify their fears or disprove them. :p

(Edit: I can’t spell obviously)