Anybody know when XNA is supposed to come out
I've seen demo's of it and know the stuff was set to come out at some point but it seems it hasn't totally yet
Microsoft XNA
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Microsoft XNA
LuckyCarl
OK fair enough, but this isn't really what people are waiting for when they talk about XNA.
Nothing to do with XNA, just logical progressions of the API
You are not the only one, but the media stuff isn't part of the DirectX team any more so you need to talk to the Vista folk and the media folk.
nikoo
Out of curiousity, which demos have you seen I wasn't aware of any live-demos/videos being available yet - just a few powerpoint presentations.
As a general point, it seems that a lot of the finer points of XNA are still being worked on and there are still a few question-marks floating around. Having said that, I'm still a little unsure of exactly what it is going to what form and how it's going to finally appear.
hth
Jack
Dennis Vys
From what I hear it's a combining of all the commonly used technologies to make the overall game development process using common tasks easier so developers can focus more on other important area's finallizing aspects that are commonly used to perform commonly used tasks, bringing out more sophsisticated and more realistic looking games with better interaction and content support, and a way to make content development easier, this in all ties together various technological standards game companies can use to build with ease and minimal frustration. Kinda like Managed DirectX, as DirectX is actually a big part of it that I remember. If every developer had to re-create the same exact code for the same exact task to handle for instance standardized movement in a 3D world we are all used too by now in terms of 1st person shooter's and other games and content development tools, it slows development down, lack of support compatibility also slows things down, especially standard file formats, just think if you had to go back in time and manually recode how to load a BMP before moving onto the next step just to view a picture, let's say there was lack of support to load a BMP, guess where you'd spend all your time, yep, you guessed it, scouring the internet, books, and local libraries, trying to find just that 1 bit of information to learn how to accomplish that 1 specific task, eliminating the need to re-invent the wheel is a good thing and from what I've heard XNA aim's to handle this, if it is successful then it definately has my vote.
Now, the next thing would be to make using DirectX even simpler by minimizing the API usage even further and expanding the built-in functionality to accomplish such tasks, why Because when i want a fully functional 1st person camera, and easily switch camera types using a simple DirectX camera object, it's not there is it I gotta manually code and/or create a class object to handle it all. Same can be said for loading files, we don't need to eliminate being able to load individual vertex information incase there's some unknown custom file formats, but I know for sure if I didn't have to manually seek out information on how to load standard graphics file format that have been around awhile now in order to be rendered by DirectX. It's the difference between writing math out on paper vs. just using a calculator, going back in time and not knowing the word BMP or JPEG, without supporting these standards there's no doubt the development process would take longer for the majority of developers, think of how anoying it'd be if you couldn't load a JPEG into anything.
:o)
Jeremy Maynor
They were on the XNA webpage, I downloaded them, they showed what's already been done but focused alot on lighting and physics interaction of each object/sub object, I like the car demo. Ok, yeah, XNA's is new stuff alright so I know it'll take awhile for it to be worked out, the main concept, however, has hit the nail on the head right now I see the DirectX sample source code in the latest 2006 SDK seems simpler and a bit familiar so it's cool. I see some event driven examples.
APMaio
There ya go, PIX, XACT, XInput, CDX/CDXUT, DXUT/DXUTGUI, in the C++ folders there are the XInput and XACT source code samples, you'll notice samples include both older version of Visual Studio project files but also the newer Visual Studio 2005 ones as well. The first clue was the new media which was already copied a few SDK versions back that included things such as the ammo.x file, there's also complete rooms which don't currently match any of the tutorials or samples I'm aware of. DirectX 10 there's 14 tutorials which are pretty interesting, speaking of DirectX, I really wish there was something new and better like DirectShow again for handling video input devices, minus the need to handle the filters so much, deprecated or not that technology atleast worked to an extent.
An XACT Visual Studio 2005 game is also supplied I think is fun to tinker around with, XACT is for the audio aspect, yeah i know XBox 360, the content development and work makes it universal to where you can code a game easily on the PC platform and it'll run on the XBox 360 as well just as easy, I thought that's how games ran anyways via emulation on a PC, then loaded as an image onto a console.
On a side note, on a poll I saw at the end of last year I noticed people chose gaming on PC more so than on a console due to several aspects, I'm one of the ones that voted I'd rather play games on a PC than a console as well, for one, I spend more time on the PC these days and it's more convenient for me, not only that but I'm more comfortable running a game with amazing graphics on a machine I can manually upgrade vital components to make things better myself. My theory on the drop in sales of certain consoles and games isn't neccessarily that one system is better than the other, nor that it's popular or not, it's just times are again changing and we don't have the kind of problems of the old crashing DOS only games, instead, we've got speed and effeciency amongst the majority of computers now and people use computers more now. This is probably true with music and movies as well.
The Netron Project
There's kind of 2 things being talked about here.
XNA - this is not a produce per se, but an umbrella of technologies/platform that Microsoft is releasing that improve the game development experience.See http://www.microsoft.com/xna/. I'm not 100% sure which tools and products come under it but XACT, XInput, Pix and.....
XNA Studio - is what Jack and Davids replies were talking about. This is a version of Team System specifically for game developers so it works with art pipelines etc. This was announced at GDC05. Prices for regular team system are here http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/default.aspx (you have to choose a currency) which *may* (I have no idea) give you an idea of possible cost.
A Casa do Java
Which source code samples do you think are part of XNA
XNA: Name of the overall strategy unifying and improving game programming experience.
The 1st things you saw come out of that strategy were PIX and XACT which were originally XBox only technologies which are now on the PC too.
The only other thing released under this umbrella is XNA build which is available as a pre release (i.e. not final not to be used in production) download on the GDC DVD image http://www.microsoft.com/xna/ and is not part of the February 06 SDK (but who knows what will be in the imminent April 06 SDK)
There are 2 announced products which have been talked about and/or shown as demos but as David said no release dates are announced.
XNA Studio: Visual Studio Team System for game developers http://www.microsoft.com/xna/
XNA Framework: a managed code based platform for PC and XBox360 devkits. Few details are known other than it will be replacing what is currently called Managed DirectX http://www.microsoft.com/xna/
I remember the videos you talk about however I'm not 100% sure how they fit into the strategy. Someone from Microsoft would have to comment on that. You can still see them all here http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/03/24/news_6092125.html
merrylep
jamesg1
There are parts of it already available via DirectX as that's part of it, some XNA source code samples are currently available in the latest 2006 DirectX SDK and includes the long awaited 2003 and 2005 projects to provide better compatibility support for the different versions of Visual Studio IDE's to load the projects as expected without headaches. I believe I saw an estimated release date on the XNA webpage when I first heard about it, hmmm.
:o)