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[Xbox-Scene]

A sneak peek at XNA Game Studio Express (Beta 2) features Posted by XanTium | October 29 11:44 EST

From David Weller's Blog (Community Manager at Microsoft's Game Technology Group): For those of you that won't be attending the Seattle CodeCamp XNA sessions today, you can check out Andy Dunn's meticulous notes about what was discussed yesterday at Mitch's talk.  Unfortunately, Andy didn't make it to Charles Cox's talk, which was a great presentation on how to write games in XNA (and covered many new features that are in Beta 2 as well).  In addition, the process for deploying a game to the Xbox 360 was demonstrated, even though that feature won't be available until the 1.0 release of XNA Game Studio Express. And in case you want to know when the next beta will actually be released, the answer is: Really, Really, Really Soon.  Stick out tongue P.S. -- No, there are no slide decks or recordings of the talks.  CodeCamp is a very hardcore series of talks, and the preference is that presenters go straight into hands-on demonstration, rather than "Death By Powerpoint".   Some things mentioned at the Seattle CodeCamp related to Xbox 360 development: * No more design time support for components. They only added minimal value and it turned out to be far more complex on the xbox/compact framework. They also had some limitations like no way to control the order of creation and initialisation. They will be back in a future version in a more impressive way. For now components still exist, you just have to create, add them and set properties in your own code. As you will see they are also improved feature wise. * XBox and PC builds require separate projects to make the build system work properly. To make an app run on both you need to make a new project of the other type and then add/link the source files. Future versions will use the build target mechanism from visual studio. * Some big changes around Render Target (and Mitch went pretty fast here...). Surface is gone, StretchRect is gone, UpdateSurface is gone, GetBackBuffer is gone (back buffer is now just RenderTarget 0). RenderTarget is a new strong type and you use a new construct called Resolve to get the data from it. Apparently this is very similar to the Xbox API and in this case it made more sense to implement the Xbox way of doing things for compatibility. * Running on the xbox - once the project was made as described above Mitch switched over to the xbox dev kit, selected an option to get the PC files and then on the PC hit 'run'. The program compiled and deployed over a local LAN to the xbox and then ran. It looked the same as on the PC. * The next beta will not run on retail xboxes - that feature is not available until RTM. However the project types and supporting files will be shipped so you can build and compile and get ready. Read More: thezbuffer.com

[gaming fanboy]

and i thought the first one was great..  

[RE687]

Someone has got to hack this. This could be the starting point for homebrew (non-M$ related) on the Xbox 360.

This post has been edited by RE687: Oct 29 2006, 06:42 PM

[shotgunsteve]

"Someone has got to hack this. This could be the starting point for homebrew (non-M$ related) on the Xbox 360."

good idea

[Eric Jr.]

QUOTE(RE687 @ Oct 29 2006, 07:48 PM)

Someone has got to hack this. This could be the starting point for homebrew (non-M$ related) on the Xbox 360.

Sorry, but that doesn't seem likely at all. XNA projects run off the 360 in a managed enviroment much like Compact Framework 2.0. And you can bet your ass off they put extra effort into security on namespaces that could infiltrate the original 360 security system. I know most namespaces used for memory management are simply not included, such as marshalling etc...

anyway, whatever

[Drunkn_Munky]

Why not just use this to create your homebrew? Perhaps it won't give you as much control, but it's a legit way that anyone can do, without breaking the law or getting banned.

I thought that was the main point of XNA.

This post has been edited by Drunkn_Munky: Oct 29 2006, 09:11 PM

[CocodaMonkey]

I think some people are looking at that Drunkn_Munky, the problem is nobody knows how it's going to work just yet. To my understanding you'll only be allowed to use stuff you compile yourself. Which means while you could make homebrew and distribute the source, other people could only use it if they knew how to compile it and then paid MS for the ability to compile stuff to their xbox's. Which is a yearl fee to my understanding.

Now that would help homebrew, but ultimately that would suck and most people wouldn't do it as it gets far to complicated. There is something about sharing projects but it's not clear how to share, and it sounds like anything that can be shared is controlled by MS. Which means if someone ported XBMC to the 360 MS could step in and delete it and then ban the guys who made it. They could then also do the same thing with emulators which means really this becomes useless to the homebrew scene as only stuff MS approves could be made and then shared. Which means you'll be able to get more flash type games on the 360.

Although I'm not sure if this is all figured out yet. It will be interesting to see if it sucks or not. It really depends on exactly what the limits are with it. At the very least it should help hackers possibly find a way to softmod an xbox and be able to run real homebrew.

This post has been edited by CocodaMonkey: Oct 29 2006, 11:14 PM

[jmnz]

But how could MS stop you posting a projects source PC code on, say, bittorrent or xbins? You could still share it that way.

[CocodaMonkey]

Well yeah you could share the source, but if you have to resort to that it means each person who wants to use it has to pay the 90$ a year fee to be able to compile shit to their xbox, and then they'll also have to of course understand how to compile something themselves. Ultimately very time consuming and expensive for a lot of people.

MS has already warned every compiled project has to be compiled on a per xbox bases. So distributing compiled software via xbins like people do with the original xbox is out for sure. It's locked down to tight for that, at least without some sort of mod.

Of course this doesn't mean all is lost, nobody really knows exactly how it's going to work. Maybe things will work out for us. We just have to wait and see what MS lets us do.

[infamous_Q]

not to mention im pretty sure MS has locked out ethernet access/internet access on the 360 XNA version, or so far at least.
it'd be smart of them to let people use programs compiled by others, w/o a fee especially. this is meant to encourage people not discourage them because they think $90 isn't worth it (personally, i dont think it is either). plus if they let people make what they want but limit what hardware it can access (but for god's sake let us access the internet and our computers) they wouldn't have to (neccessarily) worry about people trying to hack. everyone always says this scene is about homebrew and not piracy...well M$ here's ur chance to prove them right.

[mikc]

doubt u can even port xbmc to 360 lol
prob some limitations on xna