Dave Horvath
12 Dec 2006 5:46
Software giant, Microsoft has officially released it's project XNA Game Studio Express for developmental purposes on the Xbox 360 console. Their hope is to find budding, undiscovered talent in amateur game developers that can produce homebrew games for the Xbox 360. Originally announced back in August, the product has become live and is free for download.
While free sounds great, you'd do little with the source code as you can't publish it anywhere without subscribing to the $99 yearly subscription fee that grants you access to sample code and the ability to upload your projects. Microsoft hopes that new developers will turn to this service for help with white papers and game assets put up not only by Microsoft themselves but also third-party developers. Additionally, it appears that in order to allow your project to be consumed by the masses, you'll also need to partake in their $49 four month subscription that allows your finished games to be downloaded via Xbox Live.
XNA Game Studio Express will function on any PC running Windows XP and uses the coding standards for Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft.s .NET Compact Framework.
Microsoft states that downloaders will need to have an Xbox fitted with a hard drive and hints that potential downloaders may also need to subscribe to the XNA Creators Club. Reason being is the downloads will require compiling of source code in an Xbox 360 format. They stress that the intent is for non-commercial means, however the XNA project can be used to produce commercially available Windows content. Additionally, they warned that these XNA created games will not be able to be transferred via memory card, CD or DVD at this time.
Source:
The Register