Microsoft Publishes Free XBox Development Tools

prostoalex writes "Microsoft announced the release of free XNA Game Studio Express tools for developing C# games that run on both Windows and XBox. They're also selling XNA Creators Club subscriptions, which, similar to MSDN subscriptions, offer access to sample code and additional documentation. Also, Microsoft is explicitly aiming towards uniting the Windows and XBox development platforms: 'You will have to compile the game once for each platform. In this release simply create a separate project for each platform and then compile them both. Our goal is to allow as much code as possible to be shared between those two projects, allowing you to use the same source files in both projects, but platform-specific code will need to be conditionally-compiled.'"

Not quite free....

[nullset (39850)]

If you want to run the games on your own xbox, you need the "Creators Club" subscription...which costs $100/year.

So it's not quite free. And you can't distribute the games to others....unless you distribute the source and they are also members of the creator's club.

Re:Not quite free....

[Jazz-Masta (240659)]

It's a lot cheaper than a Gamecube, Wii, PS2, or PS3 dev kit. This is a major step forward. Indie developers can use it, even if it is $100 (which, let's face it, is not much money...two games worth) and if they create something worthwhile they can pay more to get it full licenced for release.

Re:Not quite free....

[acidrain (35064)]

The ps2 linux kit had device drivers instead of direct access to the graphics hardware, which made it useless for developing competitive console games.

Not QUITE informative- not really even correct.

[Svartalf (2997)]

Even in the X-Box, you're talking to device drivers, not the hardware directly. That IS what you do with DirectX- it's call that because it bypassed many of the software layers in Windows so you could write games. That's supposed to be the big selling point of the X-Box lines is that you can write for XP and do a minimal amount of work to make a console port to the X-Box or X-Box360. Talking to the hardware directly means poking values into the registers on the GPU, etc. Something few of the developers do- and none on the X-Box/X-Box 360 They typically go through a library or device driver on all the consoles to begin with. You might have done development under a console target, so your mileage may vary- but what I know of things differs from what you just said by a lot.

Re:

[SScorpio (595836)]

The PS2 Linux kit came with PDFs of the documentation that came with the professional very expensive Linux kit. I believe you receive 6 out of the 7 documents or something like that. I know they just didn't include one, though I don't remember which one it was.

Here's the free code

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

freecode.c

#include "creatorsclub.h"

Creator's Club

[Z34107 (925136)]

The press release says that they're working on removing the Creator's Club requirement for playing XNA games.

The reason you need to be a member of the Creator's Club as of now is because of the XNA framework - a souped-up version of the .NET framework - that your games are built on top of. Your games won't run without it, which means anyone who wants to run your game needs it (i.e., be a member of the Creator's Club.)

Re:Not quite free....

[ribond (149811)]

Way to fail to own it. They gave you something free (yes, there are caveats) or at worst dirt-cheap, that others sell for much more. You can now choose -- your wallet or your "must-irrationaly-hate-ms" reflex?

God help you if the indians get close to you with a few "gimme" rounds of texas hold'em. You'll never break free.

...you see where I'm going with this?

it's almost like this truly vicious practice that many shareware vendors have (wolves in sheeps clothing, these guys). They offer you up a fantastic game as a trial version and then ask you to pay for it if you love it.

bastards.

I can imagine that Sony and Nintendo are none to amused at this, so I'll just sit back and wait for them to file antitrust complaints.

...yeah. but it's MS that stifles innovation. What antitrust issue do you see here? The 2nd place player in a field tries to gain an advantage by giving things away... I'd come up with an analogy but they seem to obvious. I'll let you run with it.

Re:Not quite free....

[Blakey Rat (99501)]

The only reason behind the $100 charge per year is the same reason they charge for approving drivers, or they charge for Xbox Live:

To keep the riff-raff out.

If you're paying $100 a year, you're likely a responsible enough adult that you'll not constantly submit Xbox Live Arcade games that completely suck, have no chance at being published, and waste a lot of Microsoft's time. (They charge for driver certification so they driver makers don't start using Microsoft as a free QA service. Similar concept. They charge for Xbox Live subscriptions so assholes don't make 30 of them to dodge bans.)

It's a valid practice. $100 a year is NOTHING to anybody actually interested in game development, the only one is hurts are little kids who would produce crap games anyway. (And even THEN, they can produce as many crap games on PC as they want; the $100 only applies if you want to run it on an Xbox.)

I like the insane leaps of logic required to make giving free dev tools away to the public look like a bad thing. While you're making up anti-Microsoft bullshit, remember that releasing stuff like this is what is going to give Microsoft a huge lead in console gaming and leave Sony in the dust.

Creator's club not necessary to use XNA

[Osty (16825)]

The Creator's Club is only necessary if you want the extra content/samples/support or if you want to run XNA games on an Xbox 360 (for now you'll have to have a Creator's Club membership even if you only want to run others' code, but that should change in a future release). If you just want to build Windows games using XNA then there's no reason to get a Creator's Club subscription.

Xbox 360 only

[Mr2001 (90979)]

Those of us who haven't upgraded should note that this is only for the 360, not the regular Xbox.

SNES

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

I would love to see Nintendo do something like this. I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.

Re:SNES

[Darkforge (28199)]

Hmm, thought I'd hit submit, but the post disappeared.

Aaanyway. Nintendo has done you one better by providing Flash support in the Opera browser included in every Wii. That means that you can play games developed in Flash on your Wii using the Wiimote.

Opera is already installed on every Wii (it's used to power the Wii Shop Channel), but to access other websites you have to use DNS redirection hacks... Once Opera is properly "released" you'll be able to use it freely. Meanwhile, wiicade.com [wiicade.com] is a website dedicated to developing/promoting Flash games explicitly designed to be played on the Wii.

Re:

[colmore (56499)]

It would be interesting, but I think you'd find programming for the SNES and modern game programming to be different beasts.

Back then, with much smaller resources, a lot of work was still done in assembler and some pretty low level code that is now taken care of by libraries. There isn't the need to squeeze every last inch of functionality out of hardware any more, and the coding is a lot different.

Re:SNES

[Stormwatch (703920)]

Not exactelly. Here's more wikitrivia for you: the CPU of the SNES was a Ricoh 5A22, which was based on the CMD/GTE 65c816, itself a version of the WDC 65C816. Now, the WDC 65816 was also the CPU of the Apple IIGS, and that is why the Apple IIGS was used as an early SNES devkit. Also, some SNES games had a built-in processor, the Nintendo SA-1, which was also based on the 65816.

Channel 9 Demo

[dilbert627 (561671)]

This video on Channel9 shows off running a game on the Xbox. Pretty cool stuff.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2612 54 [msdn.com]

Non commercial

[edwardpickman (965122)]

It strictly allows only non commercial development and no distribution including free over the net. There's is another commercial version that'll be released early next year but you still face the Microsoft bottle neck. You can't release commercial games unless they approve of them and take a health chunk of the profits. It'll allow you to develope for the Xbox 360 at a much lower risk but there are no guarentees you'll be able to release the game on Xbox 360. Microsoft still retains the final approval and demands their pound 'O fleash.

Re:

[east coast (590680)]

I'm not a game developer and I don't know much about it but what's the costs associated with developing for other consoles? MS offering educational stuff for free or damn close to it isn't that bad of a deal, from where I sit.

MS put a lot of cash down to develop an entire platform, they stuck out their necks... if you're making cash from a venture involving their proprietary platform tell me where their cut comes from?

Re:Non commercial

[Osty (16825)]

A lot of people are going "holy cow! xbox programming! yay!" and ignoring that they're giving us tools that have existed in the pc world for decades. Microsoft isn't giving anyone anything.. they're seeing how much we'll pay for what we can get for free.

There are two possible answers to this:

1. When was the last time a company gave you a very inexpensive way to develop games for a console system? The last I can think of was Sony's Net Yaroze [wikipedia.org] (essentially a limited PS1 dev kit), but that was quite a bit more expensive than XNA currently is (at $100/year, it'll take 7.5 years for a Creator's Club subscription to equal the cost of a Net Yaroze). PS2 Linux doesn't count as it was seriously hindered in its capabilities, and PS3 Linux won't count until you can fully utilize the GPU. GBADev [gbadev.org] and DSDev [dsdev.org] don't count because they're not official development tools provided by Nintendo and rely on hacks to allow you to run your code on the handhelds directly.
2. What other frameworks allow you to build games for both PC (windows) and console (xbox 360) at the same time (there are a few minor differences you need to take into account, but if you write a game for Windows using XNA it's mostly trivial to re-build that for 360, with maybe a few shader tweaks here and there)? Do those frameworks allow you to load your game onto the console in a "legal" (non-modchip, non-hack) way? A framework like Torque doesn't count becase you still have to be able to get a 360 dev kit to be able to run your game (dev kits cost upwards of $10K, and getting one requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops proving that you're a competent software developer with a high likelihood of actually being able to ship your game in a timely manner among many other things).

That tools like this have existed on the PC for a while is a red herring, because tools like this for consoles generally have not. If you want to stick with PC development, that's fine, but it's orthogonal to the discussion at hand.

yeehaw! I'm gonna write me a program!

[ILuvRamen (1026668)]

I'll get right on working on a version of Open Office that runs on the Xbox :-D Then I can use that incredibly fast direction pad to type my documents. Ooh and I could bring in my Xbox for powerpoint presentations at school and have some fun when I'm not using it for that! The possibilities are endless! You may think that's a dumb idea but have you looked at the public domain roms made from scratch by people in their basements for earlier consoles like SNES, Genesis, and N64? THEY SUCK! Regular people aren't very good at console programming I guess. Office it is! :-D

Take that Stallman!

[Timbotronic (717458)]

From the FAQ:
Q: What does XNA stand for?
A: XNA's Not Acronymed

Seems even the Evil Empire has a sense of humour.

XNA is not bad

[Maurice (114520)]

I come from a low level graphics programming background. Having played around with the XNA betas that have been out for a while, I must say that XNA is probably the easiest way to get an amateur started with DirectX programming and game development. It seems almost like Microsoft is trying to get the grass roots hooked onto the platform so that the next generation of game programmers prefer the MS platform.

Oh, and people who compare XNA to game engines like Ogre are missing the point. XNA is not a game engine, it's more of a development tool/platform. It does come with lots of library code, but it's not a full-fledged game engine.

Re:XNA is not bad

[MelloDawg (180509)]

I attended the XNA Open House [msdn.com] this evening. The first demo consisted of downloading a model from TurboSquid [turbosquid.com], adding it to a XNA Game project, writing about 15 lines of code ... and boom -- there was a rendered ship that was lit, spining and was controlable by the 360 controller. Ridiculously easy.

The entry barrier has been lowered significant. I forsee alot people taking advantage of this platform.

Re:

[jonwil (467024)]

Unless you can run the linux kernel on top of the .NET Common Language Runtime.
Oh and someone would need to port it to C# too.

Burger King !

[up2ng (110551)]

Just find a way to murderlize the King and they'll sell it for $3.99 with a meal