Dream.Build.Play - anyone have a submission?

[SpaceShot]

I don't.  As much as I love XNA and am working on it, sometimes I end up taking two or three weeks off just due to life.

But that's not what this post is about.  Anyone from these boards manage to get a game going?  I'd love to hear about it.

[EclipsE]

Nope, didn't do anything... and even if I made a game, I still wouldn't submit it to DBP, because microsoft would jack my code... f****** f******
 

[Nemo Krad]

No they wouldn't. You should have a read through the Creators Club forums dude, there are a lot of people who thought that, but it wont happen.

[EclipsE]

Yeah right, who says that? Microsoft?

[muchrejoicing]

I'm impressed by how much hate there still is for Microsoft, even after they've created all these free resources. They have no reason to jack your code -- they'd much rather see you make a game for their platform, sell it, and just be successful with XNA in general. From the MS perspective, the more quality games people make for the XBox, the better. XNA seems like the biggest win-win yet for both MS and aspiring developers.

[EclipsE]

Say what you like but I won't change my mind: "MS SUCKS!"

[Nemo Krad]

Sorry mate, but I am going to have to ask...

Why does MS suck?
Why are you so anti MS and yet still develop in XNA?
What has MS done to upset you?

[EclipsE]

MS sucks because it's MS
Because it's free... at least for now
They have more than enough, but still, they want more, and more, and I've heard that Bill GAYtes wants to earn money on every e-mail we send, man, Vista is, like, 400$, why for? It's another crappy OS they made. And why are you guys so sure they wouldn't jack someone's code?? They would do anything. Like DX10 for example, do you know that DX10 will be much faster that DX9 because they corrected some things, and, I think I read, "borrowed the code from OpenGL"... enough is enough... I could talk about this all day long... they're ALWAYS stealing ideas

[Nemo Krad]

?!?!?! They are stealing ideas, since I started programming it's all I have done ! Well I have a few origional thoughts...

To be honest I love Microsoft, they have provided me with a good living over the years.

[EclipsE]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaIUkwPybtM

[muchrejoicing]

Look at the alternative. Mac OSX released six different versions of OS X (10.0 through 10.5) between 2001 and now, and each one cost the full price to upgrade. Whenever someone has mac trouble, every mac tech will end up asking, "do you have the latest version?" Windows XP came out in late 2001, and every single update since then has been free. Even if you somehow managed to pay $400 for XP back then, the Mac guy would've spent more keeping up with the last six years of updates. I'd suggest you look for the $160 upgrade version of Vista instead -- or you could just keep on using XP. Unlike with Macs, most people are happy to wait a year before moving on to Vista. Personally, I won't format my XP partition until the driver writers have had a few more months to get used to the new kernel.

Speaking of kernels, did you know that OSX runs on the FreeBSD kernel? They took an open source operating system and put a GUI on top. Everyone steals ideas in computer science -- because, at some point, no one cares who came up with the idea, they want you to code it in. Taking the idea doesn't make the implementation trivial, either -- I respect MS more for implementing good ideas from the Mac family than I do Apple for selling an ex-open source kernel. OS code is hard, and huge -- few people have really earned the right to criticize MS for writing a crappy OS. Just using threads is hard; imagine coding the scheduler.

Go back and look at creators.xna.com; the amount of free, quality code they're giving out in their Education Samples section is really impressive.

[Chr0n1x]

Unless you can source this stuff EclipsE, then those arguments don't hold up. DX10 is faster because it has a new graphics kernel (WDDM) behind it instead of the old NT one, so its got new, up to date code, that is optimised for the newer cards.
Also, DX10 is faster because the new cards have a much better architecture behind them, its like going from x86 to x64, you need a new OS and software to take advantage of it, but in the end it is a large improvement. Unified shaders is the key behind them, instead of waiting for the slow pixel shaders to complete their work before the batch of vertex and pixel shaders can go onto the next ones, meaning the vertex shaders are bottlenecking, with unified shaders there is no bottlenecking because the vertex shader is also the pixel shader.

Something to add onto muchrejoicing's argument about Mac, until very recently, meaning for many of those updates, you had to buy a new Mac pc as well most of the time, at least with Windows if you dont like it you can go to Linux, but with Mac you were stuck with their own architecture until they decided they had to move to intel.

I take it you have not done any form of Business Studies/Commerce or Economics, the primary business motive is profit, if it isnt, you are a charity, simple. Of course MS wants more, they are a business. However I dont see them raising the price of the Xbox 360 even though they are running on a billion dollar loss from it, yet the PS3 is right up there at USD$700 and AUD$1000, they are trying to sell a console which is only more powerful in its CPU and is 2+ years older, for way more than the 360's own starting price.

Some of you who have a 360 and live in America, or read the Xbox Live Arcade update lists may have heard of Aegis Wing? Thats a game made by some Microsoft interns whilst they were working there. Microsoft could have taken that idea as their own even moreso than yours and sold that on xbox live arcade, but instead they give it away for free. Normally it is difficult to get your game onto Xbox Live Arcade, let alone have MS just put it up for free.

As for your reason why MS sucks, that is the most shallow minded thing i've heard in a long time.
Tall Poppy syndrome is just terrible (hating someone/something because it is doing well), you need to get some good legitimate arguments before you start trying to defame and slander anything.

[SpaceShot]

Okay...  PLEASE, I'd love to discuss the topic at hand.

I'm sorry, but can we leave the MSFT hate in another thread, forum, or for another day.  I'll even begin by NOT expressing my opinion.

Let me open up the thread a little bit.

Anyone made an interesting game?

I promise this will be one of the first places I post when I get something worth playing.  As I posted originally, "real life" takes its toll and I don't get to devote much time to it.

[Nelson]

MS sucks because it's MS
Because it's free... at least for now
They have more than enough, but still, they want more, and more, and I've heard that Bill GAYtes wants to earn money on every e-mail we send, man, Vista is, like, 400$, why for? It's another crappy OS they made. And why are you guys so sure they wouldn't jack someone's code?? They would do anything. Like DX10 for example, do you know that DX10 will be much faster that DX9 because they corrected some things, and, I think I read, "borrowed the code from OpenGL"... enough is enough... I could talk about this all day long... they're ALWAYS stealing ideas

Are you trolling? I'm having trouble believing that you're this clueless.
Get the facts and don't believe the FUD people feed you.

[muchrejoicing]

SpaceShot -- good idea. I'm not working on anything specifically interesting -- certainly nothing I'd put in DBP; it's poorly organized, and so I rarely even mention it, but, here's my project's story:

I started a year ago, when a friend approached me with some ideas, concept art, and a fully-written storyline for an RPG with some creative combat system ideas. I started off writing cross-platform OpenGL code in C++, got hung up on collision handling for a few months (during which I basically taught myself linear algebra), and the game fell apart after I finished the collision and realized I didn't have a plan for what to do next. I took a break until XNA came along, when I went into a tutorial-reading frenzy, porting the engine to XNA as I went. A few months ago, the cumulative effects of my not really knowing C# or XNA were enough that I threw everything out, and took a month off to play with shaders and lighting and some 3D stuff I'd never use.

Finally, I set up a wiki, made my "designer" put some content up there, and got to work rewriting the engine completely. I've learned a lot about good structure from Mike's tutorials, but the mass of interfaces didn't work well with my ideas. Instead, I've abstracted all game entities into one or two base classes. Rather than adding functionality (like rendering, collision etc.) with interfaces as Mike has, I'm adding it by attaching independent classes to the core entity. The approach makes it easy to index my game data in several ways -- adding an entity to a Scene can silently put its render components in a position-culling data structure, its script components in a dictionary, and so on.

What the game needs most is structure, but I'm not sure what kinds of things to ask the designer for. So, I won't have anything to show for a while.