Microsoft Shows Full 3D XNA Games On Windows Phone 70
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually.'"
Re:Is this spectacular? (Score:2, Informative)
"So this is just a kind of interface / helper interface to D3D for .Net. Great, now you're stuck to both D3D and .Net - how does that help portability?"
It's really a wrapper, but it provides more than that- the content pipeline being one example, but it also provides other useful core game classes, whilst DirectX just provides the raw APIs.
It assists portability because it's basically providing what DirectX doesn't. It basically handles the abstraction layers you'd have to otherwise right yourself for you.
It's just an extra step of game development that is now simply done for you rather than having to waste time with yourself, a step that lets you write a game once, and have it run on a console, a desktop PC, a media player, and a phone. That's how it helps portability.
I assume you're hinting at the fact that it's not portable outside Windows, but as I say, that's not something that Microsoft have any interest or would receive any benefit from investing in so why would they? Mono or similar open source projects can always deal with that side of things if they deem it worthwhile.
Re:Mac/Linux users - Possible ports. (Score:3, Informative)
There's MonoXNA ( http://code.google.com/p/monoxna/ [google.com] ) already. But it's nowhere close to complete or even usable state.
My rough guesstimate gives about 30 man-years to produce a near-complete XNA implementation.
Re:Comparing frameworks or platforms? (Score:3, Informative)
It's true. Java is a language and a platform, .NET is a platform. In a lot of ways, .NET took the idea of Java and addressed some complaints, resulting in a better Java. No citation there, that's just opinion I see from time to time.
Java has an awful lot of segmentation due to all of the 3rd party stuff that was later integrated into Java, so multiple ways to do the same thing. .NET has a huge library and multiple ways to do the same thing, but it's all in the library - nothing external. So if you see some .NET code, you can bring it in (usually regardless of the language) and use it. Java has things like NetBeans running atop Swing - and NetBeans is both a platform and an IDE for other languages. Basically it was pieced together over 15 years, and it shows.
The biggest black eye in the face of Java is all of the complaints about performance. It's not inherently slow, but the underlying runtime allowed developers to do things like repeated string concatenation instead of using string builder, making the app way more sluggish than it needed to be. You can be an idiot in .NET, but they made things more efficient from the start, just as Java has improved performance. You can still be an idiot in Java, but it's harder now.
XNA is intended to be a gaming platform, whereas Java was intended to be general-purpose. I believe that makes Kooty-Sentinel (1291050) at least partly correct. XNA is one of those add-ons like NetBeans, so arguing about .NET vs. Java is kinda retarded.
There are Java-based gaming frameworks - many, in fact. so if you want to have a flame war, it should be XNA against [jMonkeyEngine | Jogre | Lightweight Java Game Library ], I'm sure there are others as well.
Did I mention Java is heavily segmented?