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The real problems when making a game don't stem from which rendering api you use.

Just any random schmuck can implement a rendering engine on top of directx or opengl these days.

Implementing one with a good programming interface is harder, and directx doesn't make it easier than opengl.

But the real thing that game developers should focus on (and too often neglect) is to get the overall architecture of their engine and tools right.

Collision detection, physics, animation, all those things are problems that have been solved numerous times and for which third party middle ware can be used.

However, making it easy to add new kind of objects that can be stored, inserted in the game levels, which can be manipulated and edited in the level editor, and can be manipulated easily through scripts is usually what is hard as hell if the architecture sucks.

Professional game developers very often come with architecture that sucks really badly.
As a programmer working on the level editor and asset management server for a big MMORPG project, I spend most of my time maintaining boatloads of code that load/save data in ad-hoc formats, and code specific to the various objects we need to manipulate in the level editor.

I also continuously repair and hack asset management code because the underlying design is so bad that we keep breaking references between resources.

As I noticed in previous projects as well, those things: data management, storage, and interfacing with scripts are what most issues come from when developing a game.

Another common problem is not to implement the scripting language in a way that makes it really useful, for instance by not using it for all the high level stuff (including menus and the overall workflow of the game)

Yet those people are far fewer than the others. Hmm..

You dont have to "Hmm".. We know why

We know why

Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, yes!

Edited 2006-11-19 21:58

Developers, developers, developers...

http://www.1wit.com/clips/MicrosoftCEOSteveBalmerDevelopers.wmv

Can't put a price on good kharma.

for hobbyists who want to take their games from the PC to the Xbox 360." only and never go anywhere else.

Now that would say it all.

Why is he modded down? Because he was right?

No he was modded down, because of his oversight in this:

And let me tell you XNA is really a far step forward in games development.

No, it is a step forward in Microsoft games development.

Let me tell you, if that octopus gets any bigger than it already is, gaming will become the next Windows or Office, i.e gaming the way MS sanctions it.

People keep complaining about how Linux/*BSD/Mac never offers what MS has, but they never stop to think that they push MS forward with all the money they sink in to it. It is really hard to offer an alternative, if the people clammoring for the alternative are putting their money on the wrong horse.

Ah, so he was modded down for difference of opinion.

What are you talking about?

XNA is simply an abstraction of DirectX unifying them all under a consistant API.

It's really easy to get started and eliminated the Fixed Function Pipeline in favor of the Programmable Pipeline.

XNA is the future of Managed Game Programming on Windows.

You guys keep turning this into a "Microsoft Technology Oh n03z it isn't on [insert OS name here] so it must be evil" when the fact of the matter is it is a great platform regardless of the OS it runs on.

You really need to stop thinking of everything in such a black and white "Windows vs OSS" manner.

I really don't know what you mean by "Gaming the way MS sanctions it", Microsoft already owns DirectX and by the looks of DirectX10 if I'm starting to really like the way "MS sanctions it".

Just give credit where credit is due and stop turning everything into a goddamn OS war. Jesus christ.

I'll stop complaining as soon as Microsoft provides full disclosure for their products.

"XNA is the future of Managed Game Programming on Windows."

Vendor lock-in.

"You guys keep turning this into a "Microsoft Technology Oh n03z it isn't on [insert OS name here] so it must be evil" when the fact of the matter is it is a great platform regardless of the OS it runs on."

You surely don't know anything about history. It always repeat itself.

"You really need to stop thinking of everything in such a black and white "Windows vs OSS" manner."

With Windows only APIs, it's just black. There's no white or other colors.

"I really don't know what you mean by "Gaming the way MS sanctions it", Microsoft already owns DirectX and by the looks of DirectX10 if I'm starting to really like the way "MS sanctions it"."

So would you like only one brand of clothes to choose from?

"Just give credit where credit is due and stop turning everything into a goddamn OS war. Jesus christ."

Credit to Microsoft's own tactics to maintain a monopoly? Are you kidding or are you just plain idiot and ignorant? BTW, mentioning a god doesn't help it.

There are people who really value freedom. Perhaps someday you will get hit by Microsoft's "our way or the highway" and you will understand.

Yeah, it's also a great vendor lock-in strategy. Frankly, I would rather travel the more difficult path.

Sure it is vendor lock-in, but that does not change the fact that XNA is a great leap ahead in games development. Development of a framework even remotely capable of what XNA and the associated toolchain can do would take you several hundred thousand bucks and 1000 of hours of work. Considering the costs and pressure in gamedev, this is the right way to go and offers smaller studios and freelance teams the ability to produce and focus on creative gameplay instead of reinventing the same technology time and again.
Furthermore why should MS invest into porting it to other platforms. The API should be replicable for capable OSS developers anyways and is not entirely dependent on DirectX. In theory a XNA compatible API could be build on GL as well.
On a side note concerning portability, MS offered Sony to contribute and use XNA for their Playstation line of products when it was first publicly announced (in 2004 IIRC).

BTW The triangle rendering part was just an example of how much less code it takes to do the same thing in XNA compared to DX/GL. Processor performance is relatively cheap todays development hours are not. Additionaly the performance of XNA/.net/managed code is not that bad if you get your code right.

Edited 2006-11-20 00:32

> Processor performance is relatively cheap todays
> development hours are not.


Man, how I hate this line of thought. "Development hours" are the excuse for having layer upon layer wrapped in a layer ad infinitum, and that's why today's gajilion-flops computers don't feel significantly faster than the computers of ten or twenty years ago. The developers' time is expensive, sure, but they will spend it only once. The game, however, will run, hopeffuly, millions of times, pissing off thousands of users because their new USD 500,00 8800 power guzzler won't run their favorite game at max settings..

It's quite easy to solve that.
Just release the games optimized for specific GPU's.

Like <title> 8800 version, or <title>x1950 version, etc.

Or how about paying triple or more for the game in order to get 2-3 fps more on the hardware you have.

Or how about accepting the reality that "max settings" is there so that the game will look better on future hardware, instead of setting current hardware as the upper limit.

Amen

It's not a vendor-lock in strategy. They're only tools.

Get over it. And stop it with your unfounded hate.

Unless Microsoft release it for other platforms it IS vendor lock-in.

It is only vendor lock-in because the competition cannot produce anything that can match it. If they tried to do that, instead of just trundling out the same old monopoly argument, then perhaps this alleged so-called lock-in wouldn't happen.

Unless the developper gets off his ass and ports it's to another 3D API then he wants the program to run only on the platform chosen first.

It's not vendor lock-in. They're only tools. He can port his game to another platform if so wished. Many games are run on many consoles (including XBox).

It's still unfounded hatred for MS...

If XNA requires .NET and you to use C# for game development, then it isn't a big step forward. It may seem a little easier at first, but as you worked in the games industry you already know that rendering a triangle is not the most complicated or tedious thing about game development. Even if it were, there's a lot of frameworks out there to make it easier, that don't require directx of .NET. It won't revolutionize anything, it will make games just a bit more easier to develop, but it will require enormous ammounts of memory and processor to make a complex game work on normal machines.

I'm sick of you guys who think .NET based technologies are the top of the top and a must have. It's only another lock-in created by Microsoft to prevent game companies from developing PS3 or WII games. It may seem easier at first, but if game companies commit to SDL+OpenGL+other framework they will get more beneficts having a broader market.

And without this supposed lock-in you can more easily make games for both PS3 and Wii?

I do not see what you are complaining about.

Why stick to something that isn't as good when you can actually innovate something (yes, Microsoft is actually innovating here).

There is no innovation here on the part of Microsoft. They are merely creating a new area for Vendor Lock-in. That's the only area Microsoft has ever innovated in.

Most games developers wants to be free from all that hoola-boola called Game API. They will be happier with SDL/OpenGL or just plain directX.

XNA is primarily a gift for those of you, who cannot handle abstract thoughts.

dylansmrjones: I know you hate microsoft but don't let the hate cloud your judgement.

Microsoft has built the new platforms and they are building a new cool game development framework for that.

How is it any different from all the various frameworks you get. Sorry if Linux doesn't have a good framework don't ask Microsoft to stop developing one.

You are so biased in your thoughts that instead of crediting people who worked hard, you flat out say they are doing all for just vendor lockin.

At least learn to be honest and give credit where it is due.

Now mode me down as you always try to do:)

Most games developers wants to be free from all that hoola-boola called Game API. They will be happier with SDL/OpenGL or just plain directX.

Then there is no problem; if developers don't like it, then they just won't use it.

If you would like to go over a program written using C++ with DX and C# with XNA and compare the level of abstraction present in both I think your audience would love to see the decrease in abstraction present in the latter as illustrated by you.

The level of abstraction is not the motivating factor, nor even the presence of a "game api" since most developers do not work on engine code and thus are always subject to "game apis," but that interoperating with managed code in the lower level aspects from unamanged code that will compose the rest of the engine is simply not worthwhile when the platform interface is such a small part of a game. It would be a reversal of abstraction, where higher-level languages are usually used to describe high-level aspect of the game, since there is almost no chance that any studio is going to just start coding everything in C#. If there's a big resurgence in arcade games, there might be more interest.

XNA is a gift to Microsoft's games division, since I am sure that their hope is that it will sell more 360s by reducing the conceptual barrier to entry of development. If it sells more copies of Visual Studio in the process, that's icing on the cake.

.Net (Mono portable runtime) has it's use in accelerating scripting in games, but I'd never use it for anything lower-level than that.

XNA? It's another Microsoft attempt at locking-in developers into DirectX so that games are only made for Windows and X360, and as hard as possible to port to OpenGL (=PS3, Wii, Linux, OSX). Not going to happen (MS had chance, once, to kill OGL in games but idSoftware prevented this almost single handedly).

I think Sony should release to masses their PS3 DevKit and turn it into equivalent of XNA. Not sure how it compares to MS offerings though, but I think it is more complete thing than most other kits.

come on guys, they're not forcing anyone to use XNA. it's yet another game programming framework aimed to lower programming time and learning threshold, like many others before, both commercial and free.

all in all, like other projects of this kind, it will help alot in allowing people to get their ideas into playable form. for Microsoft this is naturally about easing game development on their platforms while propagating the use of DirectX, nothing wrong with that!

that said, I can't see many commercial games written for the XBox360 using this. consoles are locked in hardware and thus locked in performance. and in meeting the nextgen demands for graphics and framerate you really need to squeeze the best out of the machine.

japanese developers really excel at this, which they have proven again and again by pushing the PS2 to it's limits. true, it's much easier developing using a high-level api, but if you want to get the raw power out of the machine, you will have to adjust your code to the hardware, and not the other way around.

and for the nextgen console games, where incredible graphics and smooth framerate is expected, you won't have the luxury of losing performance through wrappers upon wrappers of generalized functionality and the overhead of managed code. of course, I'm talking about titles aiming to push the envelope here, not space invaders.

for the hobbyists in particular, this will be a great way to get their ideas across with minimal effort. but it's not 'innovative', like someone said. there are tons of simplified api's for this kind of thing, and even complete languages specifically aimed at games programming, many of them cross platform.

XNA deprecates support for a lot of DirectX. It's sort of a disappointing side-step from MDX for the PC-side, and I guess you can think of it as a manged framework for the 360 that happens to work on the PC. It isn't a replacement for DX and it doesn't do that much to spread the adoption of DX. If it's meant to spread anything it's meant to spread the adoption of .NET, perhaps into universities via increasing-numbers of game development courses.

In a game that will be ported to many platforms the back-end details are abstracted away. Reliance on this particular managed runtime makes this a bit problematic, so I doubt that you will see any movement to the platform by any studio looking to make money. Hobbyists hoping to make the next Geometry Wars or independent developers that don't care about reaching the widest audience are already salivating for it, but they aren't exactly going to spell doom and gloom for Sony or Nintendo.

It seems that the only thing that Microsoft could actually do that wouldn't spark angsty Interweb posts is to close up shop and send out checks to its stockholders.

I have no idea what XNA is, because whenever I hear about it, it's in vague terms like "XNA makes things easier".
Or awesome articles like the one linked is this news that contains a whole paragraph of vague statements per page.

So, how does XNA makes development easier? By pointlessly wasting processing power by making things run on a JIT compiler to get a gimmick binary-level portability? Or is there more to it?

That's a good point. A product where you may seem the same thing occur is Adobe Photoshop. Flexible, but inexperienced users tend to produce the same end results, that look very amateurish. However, is that really that much different from any other "power" product? (I wouldn't consider Powerpoint a "power" product though.)

However, is that really that much different from any other "power" product? (I wouldn't consider Powerpoint a "power" product though.)

That's correct, but there's another detail: Photoshop has never, to my knowledge, been marketed as a product for Joe Blow end user. Microsoft, on the other hand, regularly does things like market FrontPage as a tool that will let anyone create a professional webpage, regardless of whether or not they have clue-one about designing and building a website.

One of the things that makes a game unique is that fact that each one is implemented slightly differently from the next. If game creation becomes nothing more than (warning: metaphor ahead) dragging and dropping from a clip-art collection, it's not something I'm looking forward to.

I think that is over-simplifying things. Have you ever used XNA or are you familiar with how it works?

It's not a "drag and drop clipart" type thing or even close. It's a complete framework.

My use of quotes was meant to imply that I wasn't taking those words literally. Sorry for the mixup.

:) Ahhh humour - how refreshing +1

Yup, the trolls are out.

ronaldst, NotParker, eMagius and CrazyDude0 just to name a few cultists

EDIT: Using words like monopoly and vendor lock-in does not equal hatred. It equals criticism. I am no more critical of Microsoft than I'm critical of Redhat or Stallman.

Edited 2006-11-20 15:47

Nah, I am not the one complaining about something that is entirely fictious. There is no problem here.

Now just admit it that you're an MS hater. I was one once too.

I don't hate Microsoft. This is quite obvious from my posts about the implementation of desktop metaphors, mail handling in Vista, desktop search, and from my profile. If you look at my posts about Windows 2003 Server, you can see I don't hate Microsoft.

I don't see why you'd need to throw around personal attacks, especially as I hadn't even posted in response to your outrageous claims. Are you still pissed that I called your bluff on the statistics you pulled out of your ass on the file format issue? Or just perturbed that I prefer OpenBSD to Syllable?

In any case, we get that you have a vested interest in everything being GPL compatible. That's what your criticism of XNA boils down to, yet again -- that Microsoft must make its framework open-source (which is the only way it could be ported to every niche platform you want supported). It adds nothing to the discussion to point out in every thread that Microsoft's new solution is not GPL-compatible. We know that.

I don't have a vented interest in everything being GPL. I'm surprised you think I want everything to be GPL. I can personally find several areas where the GPL would be unwelcome in my eyes. Toolkits, frameworks, kernels, libraries in general - pretty much anything not directly end user related would benefit directly from not being GPL. I'm not ready to consider RMS a madman, but I do agree he's taking it a bit too far. OTOH, FLOSS does have certain superior elements in its development style - but it certainly has some weaknesses as well.

The GPL _can_ be beneficial in regard to end user applications, but so can many other licenses. You know very well that I have a lot of MS software installed, and am using them on daily basis (especially VS2005).

I am not aware that I have bluffed in any way in regard to file formats and statistics. Perhaps you're thinking about the Ogg Vorbis debate? Clarification would be nice

I have clearly stated that I don't want MS to open source XNA. I've merely warned that it'll most likely lead to vendor lock-in, and as such should not be used if you want to develop true cross platform games.

I have nothing against you preferring OpenBSD over Syllable or SkyOS or any other OS. Feel free to choose. OpenBSD is a wise choice btw. However, considering your posts I doubt you've ever used anything besides Win ME and XP Home.

BTW:

Using XNA isn't GPL-incompatible. Nor have I stated it is. One might add that GPL-incompability has nothing to do with interoperability and vendor lock-in. And nothing prevents people from writing GPL'ed applications using XNA.

There are lots of things that can be done in game with a limited amount of content, or procedurally generated content.

There are also plenty of off beat things that no one in the awfully conformist video game industry would ever try, some of them which don't require large amount of content.

One of the most fun network multiplayer game I ever played was Atomic Bomberman. This is not the kind of things that require huge amount of man-power and time to deliver.

Developing amateur games on PC is not irrelevant.