Channel 9: Looking at XNA on Xbox 360 Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Channel 9: Looking at XNA on Xbox 360 Posted by XanTium | November 30 00:25 EST

From channel9.msdn.com (Microsoft blog): [QUOTE] In Part One of this series, Boyd Multerer told us all about XNA. Now, in Part Two, Frank Savage shows it all to us. Frank will talk about XNA from his perspective, deploy an XNA project to an Xbox 360, modify the application, and also give a debugging demonstration. All of this is done at 1080p, showing off both the 360's recently acquired ability to support this resolution, as well as the power of XNA. It's really quite amazing: High frame rates at 1080p under managed code using only a single core of the three available. I think it's reasonable to say that XNA is going to change the way people do homebrew games. It's going to be interesting to see what kind of crazy stuff people dream up with these tools. In addition to the nifty XNA bits, Frank and I also chitted and chatted about the good old days of gaming - he worked on Wing Commander III (one of my favorites in the series), as well as other games that I loved in my childhood. Never thought I'd get to meet one of the people who worked on Wing Commander, so, for me, it was a thoroughly enjoyable geeky event [/QUOTE] Go download the video on channel9.msdn.com

[Nubbs]

Wow this will be sweet when it's ready.

[incognegro]

Just watched the video and am seriously impressed, I was expecting alot less. This could be huge!

[zX_Storm]

Ehh.. I don't think M$ will get quite the response since the Xbox1, but at least development on the X360 is legal now. I think that because it's more controlled, they won't see the attendance the homebrew scene got for Xbox1.

Oh well, good luck to all that plan on using this. My hopes for consoles died after the Xbox1 died.

[d-range]

Wow it looks neat. Very, very neat actually, i'm really impressed. They might even be able to make it much, much more interesting by making it possible to use all 3 cores, have full GPU control and have the ability to read/write (parts of) the HDD. Then you could probably code almost anything with it.

But still, thats exactly what puts me off with the whole XNA thing: its 100% controlled by MS. In other words, the only things you will ever be able to do is what MS intends you to do with it. Admitted, it looks like that's quite a lot more than i expected, but i think we can forget about the really interesting things. For example, proper HW video playback will definitely be out, as it could disturb MS's own media center strategy. Full GPU capabilities will also be out, because it might open attack vectors through shader programs etc. Also full GPU access and 3-core support migh make it possible to create something that is better than some commercial games, which is something MS (and their development partners) probably wouldn't like. Finally, I don't like the 'XNA subscription' thing at all. It effectively means nothing you create will run on any 360 but your own, until MS allows it to.

So, technically its a very nice feat and MS deserves a compliment for that. The whole XNA initiative is one of the very few good moves MS made in the last few years. But I'll still be holding out for real homebrew on the 360. My 5 year old xbox-1 is still one of my most valued and most-used appliances, though i never use it for games anymore.

This post has been edited by d-range: Nov 30 2006, 06:36 PM

[tutu]

XNA could save the 360 from a home developers/non-gaming enthusiast point of view. If you have watched the recent PS3 Linux videos you will know that just about anything is possible on that console (e.g. DivX playback, Office, Emulators). XNA should help bring some of this to 360, we all like doing our own thing with our console.

I wasn't interested in the Xbox 1 until I could play homebrew and XBMC. That was a killer application for me.

[d-range]

XNA could save the 360 from a home developers/non-gaming enthusiast point of view. If you have watched the recent PS3 Linux videos you will know that just about anything is possible on that console (e.g. DivX playback, Office, Emulators).

I'm not so sure about that. As far as I know Linux runs through some kind of virtual-machine that abstracts from the hardware, which makes it unable to use all PSE's in the machine or go directly to the GPU. This makes it hard to believe Linux on the PS3 will ever be able to do 1080p HD decoding, at least as long as Sony doesn't provide the means to do it through hardware.