XNA Game Studio Express Public Beta Released Posted by XanTium | August 30 14:12 EST

From the press release: [QUOTE] Microsoft today released the public beta of XNA Game Studio Express, the pioneering technology designed to open up game development to new audiences, including hobbyists, students and independent developers, in the hopes of injecting a shot of creativity into the electronic entertainment industry. Novice game creators can download the tool today from http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna to develop games for Windows XP and Windows Vista, at no charge. The games built on Windows can be migrated to the Xbox 360 console system starting this holiday season as part of the XNA Creators Club subscription for $99 a year, or a four-month trial cost of $49, opening up retail console game development to anyone for the first time. Since the announcement of XNA Game Studio Express' upcoming availability on August 14, the public response has been overwhelming - more than 100 schools have requested information on how they can incorporate XNA Game Studio Express into their curricula and the breakthrough news has generated millions of hits on Internet search engines. As one of nearly 20 leading universities worldwide incorporating XNA Game Studio Express into their curricula, including Southern Methodist University's Guildhall and the University of Southern California's GamePipe, Microsoft announced additional support from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington, a leader in the field of digital interactive entertainment education. Through its ProjectFUN software running on XNA Game Studio Express and summer workshops starting in 2007, DigiPen will bring Xbox 360 console game development for the first time ever to thousands of children ages 10 through 16. "XNA Game Studio Express is an incredibly accessible tool for making games for Microsoft's game platforms and will provide our university students with modern tools and console development experience," said Claude Comair, founder and chairman of the board at DigiPen Institute of Technology. "And now with our ProjectFun for XNA Game Studio Express, we're eager to extend our educational offerings on Windows and Xbox 360 to include young children." In conjunction with today's release of the XNA Game Studio Express beta, XNA partner GarageGames will begin enrollment for its Torque X beta program which can be accessed via http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna. Torque X includes both Torque Game Builder and a version of the Torque Shader Engine which have both been developed in conjunction with XNA Game Studio Express, allowing budding game developers to use drag and drop tools to easily create great games. The final version of Torque X will be released this holiday. The final version of XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Creators Club for building and distributing games on the Xbox 360 will launch simultaneously this holiday. XNA Game Studio Professional will be available in spring 2007. [/QUOTE] Official Site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna Download: here

Let the games begin.......

or even better, let the portness begin!
I wonder if lantus already finshed SDL360?

uhm is it me or does that link not work ?

When I click on 'http://msdn.MS.com/xna' I'm connected to a different site?!?

Wow, even their internal links to it from the MSDN library are broken and are linking to some unrelated outside site. Way to go, MS!

Just click on the Download link and you'll be fine!!!

I'm just wondering. How much is really known about this right now? For example, does anyone know if there is something which would prevent people from making emulators for the xbox360 and then distributing them? Or to go even furthur since I believe I read games made could be transfered to the HD for testing, is there anything preventing someone from making a 360 dash that could work almost exactly like the xbox's?

As far as I can tell MS is basicly saying, aw, the homebrew scene hasn't kicked off yet, lets help them out. Or are there some major blocks MS is imposing to stop this?

slow download only going at 103kb/s oh well i cannot wait to mess around with it!

if I'm not mistaken, this time they could have been smart to release to public this development tool in order to avoid modding.

I mean, if you have the ability to run homebrew without having to care about soft or hardmod, relating to alternative dashboards, emulators, divx players, internet radio streamers, and so on...this should be a great move for both (them and us).

the focus is of course gaming development, but if this tool can do more, they just gave natively a bridge to accomplish much without going to breach the 360.

if instead is too closely focused on just that (gaming), they just keep the approach to invite modders to get more on the console like has been done with xmbc on xbox for example, having the benefit of a modded xbox with ftp support.

There are major blocks in place. Check earlier news posts on this-- the thing requires signed code, meaning MS has to OK your program for distrobution. It's POSSIBLE they may require it on even code you're writing and running locally. Also, network functions are blocked out entirely for the public 360 side of XNA.

In other words, no emulators and no netplay.

I disagree entirely...

I think that no doubt you can program in emulators or media players with this.

The ONLY drawback.. is that if you want to play it on you 360, you must pay 99.99.

It would be oh so easy to share the code to run from yur pc to 360 just like in the "usual places".
But MS probly knows we're gonna do this, so they might as well profit off us. "You want homebrew? pay me 100 dolla!

I've just started downloading now.

First impressions guys?

Nah, you have to pay anyway. If you don't subscribe, your XBOX 360 won't be able to connect to your PC and download the executable and run it. So, it doesn't matter if you get the source code thru XNA or thru bittorrent or whatever, your 360 only will accept to run it if you sign up.

To be clear, you can't run someone else's executable on your 360, you have to build the sourcecode for your specific 360... with a gamertag linked to the 4 month or 1 year subscription.

Worth it though in my eyes for any amateur developer. Those who can't develop and don't want to learn anything should wait for enough available cool projects before they pay the price of admission. Hopefully sites like sourceforge host them!

From MS QA:

Q: Can I create non-gaming applications (such as a Media Center/Player) with XNA Game Studio Express?
A: On Windows this is possible, but the initial release on Xbox 360 is tuned to writing games. This is an area we are actively looking to the community for feedback on the types of applications they want to write for their Xbox 360.

It appears that they are thinking about letting us develop media center stuff. One thing that sucks is that the QA also states that there is networking support on the windows platform, but not on 360 in XNA.

Sex from sientific point of view

Sex refers to the male and female duality of biology and reproduction,
a process in biological DNA that dates back 4.6 - 3.5 billion years.
DNA links back in an unbroken series of sexual reproduction taking forward
information to present day. The somewhat similar term gender has more to do
with identity than biology. The concept is confined to organisms that
reproduce sexually.

The female sex is definitely defined as the one which produces the larger gamete
(i.e., reproductive cell) and which typically bears the offspring. The category
of sex reflects the biological reproductive function, rather than sexuality or
other behaviors. In some animals, sex may be assigned to specific structures
rather than the entire organisms as some species, such as earthworms, are
normally hermaphroditic.

Sex in non-animal species
Plants are generally hermaphrodites, but this terminology
is quickly complicated by variations in the degree of sexuality.
As with animals, there are only two types of gametes. These
are generally called male and female based on their relative
sizes and motility. In flowering plants, flowers bear the
gametes. In some cases, flowers may contain only one type of
gamete, while in others they may contain both.

In other varieties of multicellular life (e.g. the fungi
division, Basidiomycota), sexual characteristics can be much
more complex, and may involve many more than two sexes. For
details on the sexual characteristics of fungi, see: Hypha
and Plasmogamy.

Sex among humans
In humans, sex is conventionally perceived as a dichotomous
state or identity for most biological and social purposes, such
that a person can only be female or male. However, when the
criteria generally used to define femaleness and maleness are
examined more closely, it becomes apparent that the assignment
or determination of 'sex' occurs at multiple levels.
Environmental, biological, social, psychological and other
factors are all believed to have some role in this process,
and the complex interaction of these factors is expressed in
the diversity of biological and psychosocial 'states' or levels
found amongst the human population. A significant fraction of
the human population simply does not correspond exclusively to
either 'female' or 'male' with regard to every level of
definition expressed in the following. This discordance
is discussed in more detail below.

This list outlines the major levels at which society currently
recognizes a difference between human females and males. Some
criteria are dichotomous and some, such as body size, exhibit
sexual dimorphism (i.e. characteristics which are statistically
more likely to be found in one sex than the other). Some of the
levels are more amenable to scientific study or measurement than
others; some are "imputed" or assigned to individuals by the
society of which they are members (e.g. whether human males must
wear trousers is a result of social norms); and some seem to
be generated within each individual as a subjective identity
or drive.

The relationship between the various levels of biological
sexual differentiation is fairly well understood. Many of
the biological levels are said to cause, or at least shape,
the next level. For example, in most people, the presence
of a Y chromosome causes the gonads to become testes, which
produce hormones that cause the internal and external
genitalia to become male, which in turn lead parents to
assign 'male' as the sex of their child (assigned sex), and
raise the child as a boy (gender of rearing). However, the
degree to which biological and environmental factors contribute
to the psychosocial aspects of sexual differentiation, and
even the interrelationships between the various psychosocial
aspects of differentiation, is less well understood (see the
nature versus nurture debate).

See also
- Evolution of sex
- Human sexuality
- List of gender names
- Mammalian gestation
- Sex game
- Sexual differentiation
- Anal sex
- Sex toys
- Sex ratio


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.... ... yeah... thanks for that.... now go away

Your on the wrong forum dude, fuck off

Uh,... wtf is this doing here, ban time!!!!!!!

why the hell are you guys quoting that long post if your calling it spam? thats just going to make it worse... and yes we all know hes already getting banned so why would we need you to tell us?

Hey, Im sure once people start making games and stuff, somebody will crack the kit or something and then be able to write emulator of all types.... I just hope that with all the power the 360 has, it will be enough for making other emulator that werent possible or slow in the xbox. Hopefully we see a saturn emulator too.

I don't know whats more annoying, that bitch posting about sex, or the people who quoted it.

Yes I can only wonder for now. I cant wait to read the reviews on the XNA kit from a developers point of view. I hope it gets amazing reviews and gets flooded by coders. I am going to download and play with it after my latest vista build completes! Sit back and enjoy the show, flood o' homebrew, and if it ever gets cracked, we will have a free and probably amazing, launch line up waiting for us. Ha I can always dream!

I also agree with Irish, delete that crap and temp ban the people who quoted it, ha!

So who ported Pong?

^ lols

I'm going to make...

Pong: EVOLVED

with super explosions, fast paced gameplay and some sweet HD visuals
*runs off to download XNA and figue out C# before someone Copies idea*

I mean seriously - it'd be a real simple fun game and could sell on the marketplace for like 100 points (also easy start for a noobie to the whole game making scene )

BTW!!!! - We NEED a specific XNA forum on here!

fucking awesome shit! thanks MS! good move

So... We can't play what we made with this beta? ... Lame I'm working on something good .

You all know that this initial BETA version XNA Game Studio Express (XNA GSE) is not for the Xbox360, right?, Microsoft has very clearly stated that this version will only let you create Windows games. The first version that will support Xbox360 will not come out until December 2006!

Doesn't seem like most of you guys grasped that fact yet

EDIT: I have explained this in much more detail in the XBMC forum, read all the posts on this page (link).

But what would be stopping the scene from distributing the code so you can compile it on YOUR pc for YOUR 360?

This is true but they've also stated that it won't be difficult at all to modify anything you create in order to get it to run on the 360 via the compatible version of the XNA once it's released later. After all the whole point is to create code that can run on both platforms, so even if you can't run it on a 360 now it doesn't stop you working on something and then tweaking the code a little later for the 360. In theory anyway.

I was extremly disapointed that this kit was released for C# and not for C++.

dont get me wrong i understand how to program in C#, but my prefered environment is C++. well that and i hate all MSVisual compilers.

Surely as its using .net, any managed .net language should be able to code for it in theory?

I can see why hey went the .net route, proper compiled c++, whilst faster, probably too hard to secure, without the extra management layer stopping code doing anything it shouldn't.

Yeah, by limiting you to the .NET runtime, they can strictly control what you have access to-- I'm pretty sure there's no inline ASM or anything, so it'll be quite hard to find holes in their security mechanism.

Of course, by blocking network access, it also makes it impossible to use it as a bootstrap for grabbing code off the network-- or rom images. Sure, you might be able to put an emulator core on there, but getting access to ROM images.. hell, I'm not sure you'll be able to read random files at all in general, for that matter.

I'm sure someone'll figure out how to crack it to allow access to non-XBL users, and THAT will open up emulation and the like, but then we'll be right back to the softmod headaches for XBL users.