XNA Game Studio Express Beta Now Available

d.3.l.t.r.3.3 writes "The long awaited XNA Game Studio Express public Beta is finally here. Despite some high claims by Microsoft, the Game Studio remains a code-only experience, with a more coherent and less fragmented feature set than the old DirectX 9 SDK. As I describe in this review, XNA has successfully streamlined many dull tasks of game development (helped a bit by the new game-supportive features of Windows Vista). It's also, unfortunately, kept too many frustrating pieces and bugs (especially when it comes to cross platform input handling and audio) to be successfully considered a real multi-platform game developing tool."

Re:I have to say I think this is a really good ide

[DavidLeblond]

Cross platform as in PC/XBox 360 or cross platform as in PC/Mac/Linux.

I think you can pretty much count out the latter. Unless there is a cross platform DirectX that no one knows about.

People are too critical

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many people are complaining that XNA is not easy enough, not visual enough. I just tried it and compared to the C++ implementation and even Managed DirectX in C# and all I have to say is that it is much cleaner and simpler to make anything.

Non-programmers are currently trying it expecting something that would work like a drag and drop interface. They have been the loudest to complain because they cannot be bothered to learn to code a little C#.

It's the former

[everphilski]

PC/XBox360. But still, that's a big thing.

If you want to do cross platform computers do OpenGL/(some windowing toolkit) ... but you will still have inconsistencies between each platform. Unfortunately.

Cross platform development? Are you kidding?

[Svartalf]

C'mon... Microsoft has completely NO desire to allow you to easily make things cross-platform
for their consoles and whatnot.

They want you as locked in as they can get you- if you want cross-platform (Considering the
overall interest in the game dev space MS has, you'd do well to consider this- everywhere
else they've had an "interest" in, they've either muscled the company out (Netscape, Stac...)
or pressured it almost out of existence (Borland, Intuit...). Do you HONESTLY think they're
NOT going to do the same thing to the Game space??) you have to do it yourself. In reality,
it's not as difficult as it'd seem. If you've done your game design right, you've abstracted
out most of the things like the input layer into something that actually handles a the interface
of things like input for the game. The bulk of the code for the game SHOULD be the game itself
not input, sound, or graphics. At that point, all you need is a translation layer inside of
another interface module for the appropriate piece and you're good to go.

Yes, it's more complicated that I'm making it out to sound, but it's NOT as difficult as
people keep making it out to be. Yes, it consumes 10-15% "more time" doing it this way.
But what people keep missing is that if you've designed it "this way" it typically gives
you back the time you spent on it in the form of less effort that comes from good up-front
design instead of relying on MS' API's, the C++ compiler, or cowboy coding to make the
work "easier".