Delivering the XNA Vision

Shortly after posting today’s morning coffee, I notice two “blogging advisories” in my inbox from the XNA team. They’re announcing two things: XNA Game Studio 3.0 and Xbox LIVE Community Games.

Given that there was an XNA Game Studio 1.0 and 2.0, news that there will be a 3.0 version releasing this holiday season isn’t what veteran bloggers like myself call “a surprise”. However, the news that XNA GS 3.0 is going to support development of Zune based games was quite a surprise. Rumors of a Microsoft hand held gaming device crop up every few months, but there’s never been any substance to them. The Zune isn’t really a handheld gaming device like the DS or PSP – the FAQ points out that it will take “creative thinking” to build a game for a device with a 240×320 display that’s designed for one hand use. Furthermore, Cesar “Zune Insider” Menendez points out that “Zune is a wireless music and video player first and foremost”.

Still, it’s pretty cool to think about what a Zune based game experience would be like. So far we know it’ll be 2D only and it have full access to any non-DRM music on the device. Also, it will be social – Zune XNA games will support wireless multiplayer with up to 8 players, though it doesn’t support cross-platform networking with Xbox and Windows. I can’t wait to see what the community does with this capability. I’ll definitely be getting a Zune now.

As for the Xbox LIVE Community Games, it’s something the XNA folks have been hinting at since last year. This is the announcement the XNA folks have been building towards since day one when they called XNA the “YouTube for videogames“. Very much unlike the retail or arcade Xbox channels, Community Games will be peer-reviewed by XNA Creators Club community members instead of Microsoft (though unsurprisingly, MS “reserves the right to reactively take down a game without prior notification”). You’ll even be able to sell your games, though details on that won’t be available until later in the year.

Like XNA GS 3.0, Community Games will be available “during the holiday 2008 season.” However, for the next month, Microsoft is offering a preview of Community Games, offering seven community developed games for free, including last year’s DreamBuildPlay co-winnerThe Dishwasher: Dead Samurai“. I can’t wait to get home and try them out.

IMO, this is a huge announcement. But what’s most impressive to me is how much they’ve accomplished in a fairly short time. XNA was only announced two and a half years ago. That’s amazing progress for a pretty small team. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

Morning Coffee 148

  • As I predicted yesterday, Microsoft announced that “For the first time, community games will be distributed through Xbox Live.” I haven’t seen a press release yet, but it looks like this will allow any XNA developer to publish on XBL. Joystiq has a few details. According to Major Nelson, six community games will be available on XBL later today. Also, it looks like you’ll be able to make XNA games for your Zune as well. Details to follow.
  • Speaking of yesterday, I referred to President Bush as “President 30% Approval”. This was incorrect. From now on, I’ll refer to him as “President 19% Approval“.
  • Speaking of politics, two more big wins for Obama yesterday. The Clinton camp, looking more desperate every day, unveiled a new website purporting to provide the “facts and myths about the race for delegates”. Memo to HRC: “Florida and Michigan should count” isn’t a fact, it’s an opinion. I can’t see how this site helps her cause.
  • Joel on Software, who used to work on the Excel team, provides a facinating look into why the Office File Formats are so complicated. Nothing more to add, I just thought it was an interesting discussion of “real-world” complications to something that seems like it should be simpler.
  • Scott Guthrie provides a client product post .NET 3.5 roadmap, much like he did for web products a few months ago. Unlike the web roadmap, which includes exciting stuff like Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET Extensions (including MVC), the client roadmap includes: better setup, better perf for WPF, better memory utilization and startup time, WPF designer improvements, and some new WPF control. Color me under whelmed.
  • My old team recently launched the Software + Services Architecture Center. S+S guru Gianpaolo Carraro recently wrote about the different perspectives this new site is trying cater to. S+S hasn’t been on my personal radar, but it’s something I really would like to dig more into.
  • In a recent charity hockey game, Team Cure beat Team Hope 2,250 to 2,223. No, that’s not a typo. The two teams of twenty faced off for 240 straight hours of hockey in sub-zero weather to raise $300,000 for cancer research. That’s frakking dedication to a cause.

Morning Coffee 147

  • My son Patrick turns five today.
    The big treat was his cousin Jack coming up for a visit. Here’s a picture of the two of them at Patrick’s party on Saturday. My wife has all the details on her blog. Update: My wife just posted a whole slew of Early Patrick Pictures.
  • If my son is five, it means this blog is also five – I started this blog about a month before Patrick was born. I never remember to mark the occasion until Paddy boy’s big day comes around.
  • Major props to the House of Representatives for growing a backbone and not caving to President 30% Approval on telecom immunity…yet. Personally, I’d like to see the House bury the measure completely, though I’m not holding my breath. But given that even the right-wing Washington Times reports “Analysts say FISA will suffice“, maybe the House Dems will do the right thing.
  • After tearing it up since Thanksgiving, the Caps have gone a little cold. 5-4-1 in their last ten and 2-2-1 in their last five. In the month of February, they’re 1-3-1 against SE division opponents. Good news is that they’re still even with Carolina (two points behind with two games in hand), half a game up on Atlanta, a game and a half up on Florida and two and a half games up on Tampa Bay.
  • Bill Gates announced a new program called DreamSpark to provide college students access to all of Microsoft’s developer and designer tools, including Visual Studio, Expression, SQL Server, Windows Server and XNA Creators Club membership. This looks like an outgrowth of the MSDN Academic Alliance program. I think it’s a great idea. Update: Looks like high-school students will be able to access the DreamSpark program too. However, since they’re minors, they have to get the software via their teachers. (via LiveSide)
  • The winners of the XNA Silicon Minds contest have been announced. Of the five winners, Specimen looks the coolest to me. I wish I had more time to get into game development. (Via LetsKillDave)
  • Speaking of game development, this week is the Game Development Conference, so be on the lookout for lots of game-related news. Xbox Live VP John Schappert is giving a keynote on “Unleashing the Creative Community”. XNA GM Chris Satchell said last year they would “announce full details on, and … vision for, opening XNA creations to the community” sometime this year. I’m guessing this is said announcement.
  • Speaking of Xbox, there’s a rumor that Microsoft and Netflix will announce this week that Netflix is bringing their Watch Instantly service to Xbox 360. If true, sign me up!
  • Grigori Melnik announces the GAX/GAT February 2008 final release. Key feature is VS08 support. Is it just me, or does calling it the “final release” make it sound like they won’t be upgrading GAX/GAT further?
  • Speaking of p&p, Grigori also announces the Feb 2008 CTP of Unity, p&p’s new IoC container. I’ve seem lots of folks echoing the announcement, but not much in the way of specifics on Unity itself. For example, Chris Brandsma describes IoC and mentions Unity, but he doesn’t cover any Unity specifics. 😦
  • MSIT EA Nilesh Bhide has started blogging. His first post is on Customer perception of Service Quality in S+S/SaaS. I’ve worked closely with Nilesh in the past two years, so I’m excited to see him take to the blogosphere. (via Nick Malik)
  • I don’t know how I missed it, but the MSDN Code Gallery launched last month. As Charlie Calvert explained, this is logical successor to GotDotNet’s user samples area. Between Code Gallery and CodePlex, GotDotNet has finally been shuttered for good.
  • Telligent, makers of the very popular Community Server, have released Graffiti CMS, which looks like a more flexible content platform than Community Server. (via DNK)
  • In somewhat unexpected news (at least, unexpected by me) Microsoft has released specs for the Office binary file formats. I’m not sure why this is happening now, rather than say when we released the specs for the Open Office XML file formats. (via DNK)

You Call This Archaeology?

I know how I’m celebrating my birthday this year. Well, technically the day after my birthday.

I’ve always been a movie buff and, other than Star Wars, I can’t think of a movie series that shaped the way I think about movies and movie making as much as Indiana Jones. I remember well going to see the first three Indiana Jones movies with my father. Of course, now I’m a father, but Patrick and Riley aren’t really ready for Indy yet. So they’ll have to be content with Lego Indy for a few more years.

Otherwise, here’s hoping Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull doesn’t suffer from Star Wars prequel-itis.

Morning Coffee 146

  • The writers strike is officially over. Everyone goes back to work today. Thomas Cleaver has what I thought was the best post summarizing how the writers won. TV Guide has a rundown of how and when various shows will resume. I can’t wait to see Daily Show and Colbert Report tonight. Lost – aka the best show on TV – looks like it will be getting five more episodes (in addition to the eight shot before the strike).
  • Speaking of TV, Battlestar Galactica Fans: circle April 4th on your calendar.
  • Obama won all three “Potomac Primaries” yesterday, and is now the Democratic front-runner, though there’s a long way to go before the convention. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has a great take on presidential experience – I’m guessing he’s an Obama fan.
  • In minor acquisition news, Microsoft is acquiring Caligari, makers of 3D modeling tool trueSpace. The Caligari folks are joining the Virtual Earth team, though I wonder what the XNA folks think of the acquisition. This isn’t the first 3D modeling product Microsoft ever acquired – we owned Softimage for four years in the ’90s.
  • Scott Hanselman and Tomas Resprepo both write about PowerShellPlus, which I saw week before last @ Lang.NET. Scott really likes it, for both PS novices and gurus, but Tomas thinks the UI is busy, based on the screenshots. Personally, I’m not doing much PS work lately – occasional one off stuff, but that’s it – so it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
  • Speaking of Scott & Tomas, Scott also has a nice gallery of VS themes. I’m partial to Tomas’ Ragnarok Grey. Is there a VSThemesGallery.com site somewhere?
  • Still speaking of Scott, he points to the new ASP.NET Developer Wiki (beta). I poked around, but didn’t find anything shiny. I was very surprised that searching for “MVC” returned no results.
  • Speaking of MVC, Scott Guthrie has a rundown on what’s coming in the MIX preview release of ASP.NET MVC. Biggest news IMO is that it’s /bin deployable – i.e. you don’t need your hoster to do anything special to support MVC (assuming they already support ASP.NET 3.5). Also big news, they’re releasing the source so you can build and patch (and enhance?) it yourself.
  • Chris Taveres continues is ObjectBuilder series and Tomas continues is DLR Notes series. BTW, my F# based DLR experimentation continues, albeit slowly (frakking day job). Hope to be able to post on this soon.
  • One of the things driving my interest in F# is manycore. An interesting tangent to manycore is general purpose programming on graphics processing units (aka GPGPU). MS Research just released a new version of Accelerator, just such a GPGPU system. I personally haven’t played with it – I’ve been focused on writing parsers, not parallel code.
  • Is XQuery really “a promising technology of the future” as Don Box suggests? I see exactly zero demand or use for it in my day-to-day work. Of course, Don’s paid to build future platform goo, so maybe it is promising and Don’s afore-mentioned goo will leverage it, though I remain skeptical. As for XML being “Done like a well-cooked steak”, I’d say XML is like a great steak cooked perfectly, except it’s done exactly how you don’t like it. You can appreciate its quality, but you don’t really enjoy it as much as you could have.