XNA - Redistributable License Clarification Please
Hi all,
Hi all,
I realise the XNA is only beta form, but I would like to make 100% sure that we would be allowed to distribute the xna dlls ourselves with any game we made.
In my case this isn't for a commercial venture, rather there are a couple of development competitions I'm interested in, particularly at gamedev.net and xbox360homebrew.com - that I would like to enter a game based on xna for. For the xbox360homebrew.com competition, the rules are lax and the audience is basically other people messing with the XNA too. The gamedev.net 4E5 competition however is more strict as far as what has to be installed on an end-user machine to get a game working. I expect demanding them to download and install the 100s of meg worth of C# Express + XNA Express Beta is probably against the spirit of the rules there!
So could a MS bod please clarify if the XNA dlls could be redistributed with a competition entry to get it working without the overhead of the entire dev environment, or not?
Many thanks,
Paul
Distributing the DLLs with the application as an xcopy type distribution is unlikely. The DirectX EULA has not allowed this for any of its assemblies including managed directx becuase microsoft do not want multiple copies of the DLLs all over peoples machines.
Instead they offer a web installer which will put things in the right place, and a setup program that you can include with your games setup program which will do the same thing.
However its 100% for sure that there will be a distribution mechanism that will gte just the runtime files onto a machine without having to install the deve environment. However given the past history this will *not* happen until RTM. To be honest that is a good thing becuase othrewise people write installers and end users who don't want beta software end up with it on their machines.
I know SuperPig from gamedev has been asking about using XNA in 4E5. However since the release of XNA has not been announced it may not be a library they are prepared to support. I'll see if I can get him to post his decision in here.
| So could a MS bod please clarify if the XNA dlls could be redistributed with a competition entry to get it working without the overhead of the entire dev environment, or not? |
|
Right now - NO, the beta EULA does not have any redist rights. The only legal way to get it is GSE beta install.
Thanks ZMan, I figured that it might be distributed under the same terms as DirectX. But as Atlas and a few other enabling / middleware MS products have been so nice about redistribution lately, even in the beta phase, I figured... worth asking ;-)
 PaulECoyote wrote: |
| I expect demanding them to download and install the 100s of meg worth of C# Express + XNA Express Beta is probably against the spirit of the rules there! |
|
Indeed. :-)
| So could a MS bod please clarify if the XNA dlls could be redistributed with a competition entry to get it working without the overhead of the entire dev environment, or not? |
|
The word I've had is that when XNA comes out of beta this holiday, it will include a redistributable end-user runtime for Windows. Until that time, you can't distribute the XNA dlls.
As far as 4E5 is concerned, it comes down to this: If the XNA 1.0 release happens before the end of November (i.e. the end of the contest), then you can ship your entry with the redist that it provides. If it doesn't happen before the end of November, then you're screwed.
