109: The DNA of XNA

[N. Evan Van Zelfden]

The DNA of XNA

"It all started when Microsoft decided to build their technologies specifically with developers in mind. Mitchell says XNA came about when Microsoft realized the small-time developers, people new to development, were encountering 'the "country-club mentality." You sort of have to know someone to break in [to console development].'"

N. Evan Van Zelfden talks with Microsoft about XNA and the future of game development.


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[Bongo Bill]

I'm torn. On the one hand, I've worked some with XNA. C# is an astoundingly convenient language to use, and the way XNA wraps around DirectX is a very natural extension of that, and I am given to understand that the unsafe mode that XNA introduces lets the code approach the speed of well-designed native C/C++/assembly. On the other hand, I always like to make my code as portable as possible, and being locked into Microsoft platforms (don't let their marketing-speak fool you; Microsoft's idea of "cross-platform" is code that runs on multiple versions of Windows and maybe even on the Xbox) is something I really want to avoid.

Now, the only question that remains is whether more agnostic tools can catch up.

 

[Sindwiller]

Well, there are a bunch of cross-platform frameworks/rendering engines with lots of extensions. They're also a tad more mature and have big communities. For instance, the Object Oriented Rendering Engine (OGRE) [http://ogre3d.org], which runs on Windows, OS X and Linux, supports both OpenGL and DirectX (naturally). It has various ports (.NET/C#) and a bunch of wrappers (for example python-ogre), as well as bindings and wrappers for various libraries which are important for gamedevelopment (plib networking, several phyisics libraries including PhysX, GUI's, an OpenAL wrapper, etc.). Another nice alternative is Irrlicht [http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/]. They're both open source and royalty free. (I don't know if there's a Xbox port though)