Last time I looked at XNA it was at version 4 and you could use it to develop C# games that ran on Windows, or Windows Phone, or Xbox 360.
Just been poking around again and I can't get any sense out of what the current state of play is.
The emphasis is very very much on Windows phone 7.5, then to a lesser extent 360, and for Windows you just get pointed at the DirectX SDK.
Has it been re-envisioned again? At some point I remember the C# version disappeared and you only had the C++ version, I sort of lost interest then.
Thanks
It is still used for windows 7 development. And runs fine. I use it all the time.
The future of it for windows 8 is unclear. All the topic on different sites are just ideas, and nobody "really" seems to know. Its just rumors really. So we will just have to see.
Apparently Windows 8 can run it in desktop mode, But not metro. As it seems Microsoft just loves HTML 5 and JS now.
I wouldnt say its focused on XBOX and Wp7 completely, alot of those games dont seem to be very good, and it dosent seem to have attracted big AAA titles to those platforms, But I have seen many nice games with XNA for windows (Terraria, Magicka)
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I programmed with DirectX 9 / OpenGL and C++ some years ago and I wanted to start a new hobby project with SharpDX and DirectX 11. I made the first basic steps and everything looks nice, but I only the opened my application and saw, that everything's as expected and closed them afterwards.
Today, my application was opened for about 20 seconds and suddenly my whole window content disappeared. I checked the official SharpDX samples and I had the same problem with the official MiniTri sample from SharpDX. Finally, I tested the offical samples from Microsoft in Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)'s Direct3D11 Tutorial 02, which does nothing more than showing a colored triangle. Even the official sample from Microsoft (which does neither use SharpDX nor C#) has the same issue on my computer. Of course, I used my favored search engine for quite some time, but I was not able to find anyone with the same issue. Maybe I searched for the wrong keywords.
After around 14-20 seconds, the content (i.e. vertices) of the window disappear. I have no rotation, animation, movement or anything, just simple triangles with a simple color.
I'd be very happy, if you can help me!
I spent several hours to figure out, why some simple official SharpDX and DirectX tutorials do not work correctly on my machine. Finally, I decided to ignore that issue and contine with the development of my game. It was a great decision since it turned out, that I don't have any issue with the advanced tutorials! The MultiCube sample from SharpDX worked very well and its content did not disappear. So, I figured out that my problem does not occur, if my graphics card is kept busy. I continued my development while running Fallout 4 minimized in the background. Developing this way, my content did not disappear.
I started to implement a user interface for my game using Direct2D1 (with SharpDX). It turned out that using Direct2D1 solves my issue and the content stopped to disappear.
I am not absolutely sure what caused my issue, but apparently my GPU got bored and stopped rendering my simple primitives. :-D Using Direct2D1 for UI solves this problem anyhow.
I've recently heard about the converting feature of Adobe Air but how well does it work?
Does it emulate every bit of code a complex Flash game using tons of libraries outputs or should you expect a lot of work to go around if you were to convert one?
I'm thinking of making a complex cross-platform game but not sure which is better/easier, to use Flash and Adobe Air for its abundant game libraries, resources and faster development or to simply go with Java.
It Would really save lots of time if I can use Flash. Though, I can imagine it would also give me headaches to worry about all the time. Like what if adobe/apple stops supporting Flash or what if the converting feature won't work.
Any advice and any bit of information would be welcome. Thanks.
AIR works well on iOS in my experience although native apps will always perform better. I cant think of any aspects of Flash that wont work when converted to run on iOS.
Whether AIR performance is good enough really depends on the individual case - how gpu and cpu intensive the game is.
You have to consider the trade-off: use existing Flash skills to create a 'good' game quickly; or learn new skills to create a 'better' game slowly - is it worth spending weeks/months learning new skills to get a few extra percent of performance? Only you can decide that.
Regarding Adobes AIR support in the future; who knows - they dont have a great track record (think flash on mobile) - but i would suggest AIR will be around for at least the medium term, if not long-term.
My personal opinion is that "mobile" is not going anywhere and now is the best time to start learning Java for Android and/or Objective-C for iOS. Like PhoneGap, Flash mobile Apps don't give you complete access to the devices entire API/SDK options, even though what they do offer usually suffices. Flash is still a respectable tool but developing "native" gives you full control over your app's memory, device interaction, cutting edge APIs, etc ...
Depending on how optimized your action script 3 code is written, you may experience some performance issues vs utilizing native graphics libraries. I assume the latest version of AIR (I know Flash 11.2 and on included some nice graphic stuff) may address performance but haven't seen any benchmarks for AIR on mobile devices yet.
If you are hoping to go the AIR route, I'd say why not take a few days and try to port it over. If all else fails get a nice iOS or Android book and cuddle with it every night until you are confident you can recreate your App natively.
I know you can write applications for the Zune, but what about the Zune HD?
Answer:
http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2009/09/xna-game-studio-31-zune-extensions.html
yes. And, while XNA targets gaming, normal apps are usually less complex, so IMHO there's nothing that says you won't be able to deliver normal apps as well as games that target the HD.
Mine's already shipped.
After much research on Google I have determined that the Zune HD is likely, but not officially confirmed, to have support for XNA. If it does have support for XNA, you will be able to create apps for it, although those apps will likely be games as XNA is primarily a game development framework.
UPDATE: XNA Studios just added Zine HD support. So yes, you can at least make games for Zune HD as well as any other app you can make with XNA.
Doesn't sound like it -- see here:
Zune HD will indeed be getting
applications, but at this time
Microsoft is planning to keep the
development in-house. In those
situations where they do want to work
with a third-party developer, it will
be a close relationship with the
Redmond,WA-based software giant. In
other words, you won’t be seeing the
wild west frontier mentality that we
have seen grow up around the iPhone,
iPod Touch, Google Android and the
Palm webOS. At this time there will
be no independent software development
kit (SDK), although Microsoft does not
rule that out for down the road a
ways.
...and also here.
Ever heard of OpenZDK?
"That’s about to change. Through the work of myself as well as Netrix, Nurta, and the rest of the ZuneBoards Development Front, all Zune models, including the Zune HD, have been hacked. The first true hack available for the Zune, this makes it possible to, for the first time, run applications directly on top of the Zune firmware, with full access to everything XNA withheld before. The limitations of XNA are now no limitations at all." (from Zune Boards: http://www.zuneboards.com/?p=vB50442)
The OpenZDK wiki: http://zunedevwiki.org/wiki/
Personal experience: I have used XNA games on the Zune HD along with the Zune 30...works great!
My zune just updated to 3.0 (didn't even realize they were releasing something new!) and the update came with two games, but the Zune marketplace does not have games.
Where do I go to get started, and what are the capabilities of the Zune in terms of games/apps?
Well, first, you must download the Microsoft XNA 3.0 CTP. Read the documentation, which will explain the capabilities. But, from memory:
No hardware accelerated 3d (obviously, you can create a software 3d engine and then render the result to a 2d sprite, but... Don't expect much in terms of performance ;))
No XACT, you must use a new sound API
Just an update but note that XNA 3.0 has been released. It requires some flavor of Visual Studio 2008.
I downloaded it and coded & deployed "hello world" to my Zune in no time at all. Very easy.
You should check out the blog of Rob Miles. He has a few chapters of his book on his site. Great place to start.
I was hoping someone here would have better resources, but as this seems to be a new area of development, here's one resource that appears to give all the steps for a newbie to get started (too many assume you already have Visual studio, etc).
I'm really interested in a better in-depth overview of the capabilities as well, though.
-Adam
It's gotta be free. It's hobby, after all, not a business!. Creating for-profit software isn't an issue, but anything that requires a hardware mod is out.
Nope, I don't think so. The only other .NET environment for consoles I know costs money and is called unity3d: http://unity3d.com/
I think it supports the iPhone and the Wii and uses Mono as runtime environment. 200 bucks and you are in :)
No, all of the major consoles, except for the Xbox 360, do not have open development environments. There are various homebrew kits you can get, but these aren't sanctioned by the console makers (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft), so at best, you'll only be able to give away ROMs of what you make for free. If you try to sell anything, you'll get sued into the ground.
As Adam said, homebrew is pretty much the only way to do what it sounds like you want to do. A lot of times, using homebrew kits also involves modifying the console in some manner.
There is a Linux-based portable game device called the GP2X that might interest you, but I think that open source game development (or at least game development using open source tools) is more of a PC thing.
If you are a student at an accredited university, you can get a free 12-month trial subscription to the XNA Creator's Club through the Dreamspark site.
Free and official? No. And XNA isn't free in the respect that you have to pay $99 to use it on the 360.
You're pretty much limited to hacked, homebrew development, coupled with hardware modification. There's at least one console out there where the hardware modification is not required but I'm not sure if we can talk about it.
On a historical note, Sony released something in Japan called Yarouze on the PSX which had a similar situation to the XNA Creators Club on the 360 (paid kit, only for hobbyists) but it never came to the USA.
Not as widely documented and supported as XNA, but here are some libraries with documentation/wiki's for the handheld consoles.
GameBoy Advance: HAM
Nintendo DS: PAlib, devkitPro (the basis for pretty much all homebrew on the DS)
You may still be able to find a "PS2 Linux" kit available - but the games you make there will only run on other instances of PS2 Linux - a limited audience.
It depends what you classifies as a console. The iPod Touch and the iPhone has got the iPhone SDK with which it should be possible to develop quite good games and when you're done they can easily be distributed through App Store either fer free or for a price of which you will be given 70%.
as bhinks mentioned, there's the GP2X, but has been around for a bit, and there's a huge community of homebrew game developers for it. the GP2X has now ceased production, and it has 2 successors on the way, the WIZ by the same company, Game Park and the Pandora which is a proper enthusiast device.
the beauty is you can do games in SDL and build for all devices, including the PC
Just pay your $200 for the Unity3D indie license and you can create games for Pc, Mac, the browser, iPhone and Wii. It's arguably a more powerful enigne than XNA because it has built-in collision detection, physics etc