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:5, Interesting)
I've played 3D stuff on my Nokia for a few years now as well, but it's really primitive - unfiltered textures, very few polygons before it slows down to the crawl...
XNA is a managed (.NET), higher-level layer on top of D3D which is fairly powerful, and also portable between PC, Xbox360, Zune HD, and now WinPhone. I think it's the portability that is going to be played on most here. Now, you obviously aren't going to make MW2 or Dragon Age that way, but I hear casual games are also a big market on PCs these days...
Re:Is this spectacular? (Score:5, Interesting)
3D on a phone isn't really the news here to be honest. It's the fact that it's done with XNA which means you can build for Windows, Zune, XBox, Windows Mobile with a negligible amount of per-platform code.
XNA like DirectX encompasses your graphics, math, audio libraries and so on so you can actually concentrate on writing the game, rather than writing code to support the creation of a game.
It's a good thing for those who just want to build games whatever the platform, because it means they get to use probably the easier professional grade development toolset yet, with a decent professional grade language, and then publish for 4 platforms from the start- 2 of which are pretty major.
The guy behind "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1" released some stats lately stating he'd sold 200,000 copies on XBox indie games at $1 each, minus Microsoft's $30 cut (which is actually extremely reasonable as industry figures go) he's made $140,000 off a game that could be made in less than a week. With this news he can now port to Windows Mobile 7 phones.
If you just want to concentrate on writing game code, and would like to monetise that, it's probably the single best path for indies right now because you've got such a large potential userbase - Windows users (100s of millions), XBox 360 users (40mill), Windows 7 Phone users (potentially tens of millions), Zune users (all 4 of them).
I don't even think Mac/Linux users should despair either really. Indies don't generally have the resources to create a massive multi-platform game from the off, and although XNA wont port straight to these platforms it does as I say provide indie developers an awesome and easy path to market. When they achieve success, porting to other platforms becomes less of a problem for them because they've got the income and experience needed to do it if they so choose. This is somewhat what happened with Popcap- they started out with just Flash and then Windows games, but their success was such that porting the likes of Bejewelled to every other possible platform became feasible to them.
Spectacular, no. Good thing? I'd say yes, particularly for indies.
how about some battery? (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't want gaming on my cell phone.
Sure,I can game on my phone, but I don't. The battery honestly just can't take it. I like to have my phone do the phone stuff, I like that I can check the internet if I need to. What I don't like is having to recharge my phone every 4-6 hours because gaming/video's drain the battery.
When you (as in the clever people adding all this extra crap to phones) can actually make a battery that can handle all that stuff, then I'll be down to game on my cell phone.
Till then, I just carry my dingoo around also. (for those that don't know, dingoo a320 is a portable emulator about the size of the bottom of a DS.)
I understand the need to have a "all in one" device, but until the battery life problem gets solved, we won't get there. (of course, not standing any new tech like reduces the power of such devices)