3rd Party Software and 360 deployment
Howdy,
One of my friends asked me an interesting question the other
day.Will 3rd party software’s
be able to deploy to Xbox 360. After reading about Torque X my auto response
was yes sure they can. Although after looking and digging some more I am not so
sure. Without full 360 support and being not being able to testing everything
myself I am left with some hanging questions.
Will support for 3rd
party software deploying to 360 ever be released or would this go against the very
idea of the creators club. As well I am not really sure if this correct but I believe
that 360 binaries are basically the same as windows binaries and can be created
through some means in .Net Framework if that is the case would this process
ever be released so 3rd party software could develop and compile
content and deploy it later via XNA studio or some other means MS is cooking
up.
I hope the XNA team gives this some
thought as a lot of interesting ideas for content development and management application
are all ready floating around Torque X being a great example and without this
type of support we left holding a nail with no hammer, so to speak.
Take Care,
Near
Likely, 3rd party software would be available for deployment, such as Torque X. However, at least at first you'll need to have the source for such software and the right to distribute it to others (most likely other people with the same source).
I'm sure that eventually Microsoft will provide a way for middleware vendors to support hobby development on the 360 without requiring that their source is available, but for now that isn't the case.
I've been wondering about this too. We're currently working on a little game in MDX and are using a wrapper to a 3rd party unmanaged physics engine for our physic simulations. This would prevent us from porting the game to XNA and deploying it on the XBox, since interop won't be available afaik (at least not in Express). And since most (if not all) physics engines are unmanaged, this is a potential downside to XNA. The same goes for other unmanaged libraries that would be useful, like Bink for example.
Obviously if XNA proves succesful, middleware companies will start porting their libraries to C#. Until that time however, professional game development in XNA is hampered, which in turn might prevent XNA from becoming an interesting market for middleware companies. I don't know if the commercial version of XNA will address this, but it would be great for MS to work together with the middleware companies to create approved wrappers to work with their unmanaged libraries from XNA. Or better yet, to get them to provide managed middleware!
Are there any official plans on this?
Howdy,
Thanks that really help clear up some things although I am
still left wondering about one other thing. Can or will 3rd software’s
like Torque X or other content development and management products ever
be able to connect to the 360 and deploy directly without the need to go
through XNA Game Studio Express.
Take Care,
Near
