MS Releases XNA for Xbox 360, homebrew for the masses!

wicked, checking the video out.

 

Just so I have this straight, does this give you full access to the 360 hardware, or is it crippled in some way?

 

The XNA Games Express isn't necessairly "crippled" but it does have some limitations. After all if it was a full dev kit you'd be spending a HELL of a lot more than $500 ($400 for Xbox 360 and $100 for Creator's Club subscription) on it.

That said, you get access to most of the core hardware via API calls, so yes you can do full on 3D games and render all sorts of pretty special effects. Some components are not supported (no network support on the Xbox 360 yet for example), but all of the key bits are around.

What you cannot do with XNA is skip an API call and write directly to the hardware via optimized assembly code. If you think this is "crippling" the consumer release of XNA, well then you've got mad coding skills and should be working on a full dev kit at a proper dev house making the "fat cash." No homebrew coder is going to be limited by this factor.

-hl718

 

Does C# even suport asm code? (like in C you can just write __asm {})

Also I don't see anybody really needing to write asm for the 360. If you're going that far, you're best contacting microsoft to become a licensed developer (I think actualy quite a few XBLA games are already in C# with XNA).

Also atleast this is more open then linux on ps3. I hear you can't access the GPU for 3d rendering.

 

TheDeathcoaster: cute loved the music I got some flashbacks , back to the old school shooters, and the music was sweet anyway great work

 

C# does support ASsembly but not natively. There is a way you can call it using an unsafe code block and inserting some C++ to actually to the _asm call.

I wouldn't believe this works on the 360 though.