One of the guys on the team just forwarded a great video from a GSE game "The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai".
It looks amazing and I love the visual style. It's great to see games like this popping up from the community.
I think the Dream Build Play competition is going to be generate quite a few interesting games!
Back to planning:-)
I didn't get a lot of responses to my previous XNA Game Studio Express blog entry (perhaps because I let this blog die to inactivity:-() but I thought I'd try to spice things up with a different Visual Studio focused question.
As we finish up the refresh release to XNA Game Studio Express, we are looking at the next major version and some decisions that need to be made. I wanted to get some impressions from people around a particular topic that I am currently looking at.
As many of you know, Visual Studio is releasing a new version at the end of this year (codenamed Orcas). One of the major features we are planning to add in the next major version of XNA Game Studio Express is the ability to create games in all SKUs of Visual Studio (Express, Standard, Pro, etc). With Orcas coming, the next obvious question is which release of Visual Studio should/can we support.
I have the following basic questions:
- How quickly do you personally move to new versions of Visual Studio?
- What's the impact you would feel if we only supported the Orcas version of Visual Studio with our new functionality?
- What's the impact if we supported only VS 2005, and added Orcas support later (in a refresh release a few months after Orcas ships)?
Joe
I've been suffering from a very painful audio problem on Vista. Towards the end of all my songs the sound would suddenly start to skip and the sound would be very jittery for the last 20 seconds or so.
Initially I put it down to driver issues but after installing new ones, the issue still occurred. I got annoyed and eventually stopped playing a lot of music at work in my office. I finally had enough the other day and a quick Live search later a resolution appeared "turn off sound enhancements":
http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/windows-media-player-skips-ftopict36704.html
No more skipping and I'm much happier!
Customers have used our product forums and Microsoft Connect to tell us that adding support for all versions of Visual Studio (Standard, Professional, etc) is a major feature they would like in the next major release of XNA Game Studio Express.
Delving into the feedback there are some consistent asks for specific features. The most common asks are:
- Expanded debugging functionality. People want to use some advanced debugging features not available in Express (more debugger windows (threads etc), different breakpoint functionality (conditional, tracepoints etc) etc).
- Source Code Control. People want to be able to check their projects into source code control.
- Profiling information for Xbox 360 games. People want to get a better idea about the performance of their game on Xbox 360.
We are definitely investigating these areas and more but I wanted to extend an invitation to anyone to send me mail or add a comment about any specific Visual Studio feature they want to use while creating a game. I'll gather the feedback and make sure that we incorporate it into our planning.
Fire away!
It was a dark and gloomy night in Netherstorm when FJ (Rogue) and Devnul (Druid) escorted a poor wanderer on his appointed task. After a short walk, a great battle was engaged and after the dust had settled the Invasion Point Gate was finally closed.
Upon returning to the quest giver, FJ was rewarded and finally leveled to 70. Here's a happy picture of the occasion:
Once turning 70, FJ just had to get his flying mount:
So that's what I have been doing for a while now (the last push from 66 to 70 was kind of crazy in terms of time management) and that's why I have a considerable sleep debt at the moment!
Now that's it's over I'll have some time to blog about work related issues.
I gave into temptation the other day and bought some Nike+ runners and the iPod extension thing so I could run and get feedback.
I've turned into a bit of a shoe freak, so I actually ordered one of the Nike ID shoes where I could customize everything on them (this included getting my GamerTag ("Feral Joe") printed on them).
I actually read the manual for the shoe insert that wirelessly transmits to the iPod receiver and came across this delicious warning:
"Important: Put the sensor to sleep before taking it [iPod sensor] on an aircraft, to comply with applicable government regulations"
I laughed when I read this. Can you imagine the looks you would get if you were in the waiting area for a flight and pulled off your shoe, removed the insert, grabbed a small high tech looking device from the shoe and used a paperclip to press a button on the sensor. If you were lucky you might be able explain, otherwise you might be in for a nice chat with a TSA employee.
And don't even think about doing that on the plane itself!
I recently answered a number of questions about XNA Game Studio Express from Alistair Wallis at GameCareerGuide and the article has just appeared.
Michael came into my office this morning and made a comment about my lack of blogging over the Xmas/New Year break. I informed him that I spent way too much time playing WoW, watching the NFL and College Football to have any time to blog.
But I am back at work and busy working on various features around XNA Game Studio Express. My highest short term priority is making progress on our sharing story for XNA Game Studio Express games (and waiting for the Burning Crusade to come out!).
Visual Studio SP1 has just been released. I'd encourage anyone using XNA Game Studio Express to install it. This SP has a number of fixes in it and from personal use it unblocks some Vista related issues.
Remember to install the Express version of the SP.
My five year old told me this the other night as I was putting him to bed :-). It's amazing how many things kids understand.
Hey, I asked a team for a feature the other day and they said maybe...
As a programmer I can understand code but I have little/no artistic talent. One of the key things we wanted to address with XNA Game Studio Express is making content a first class citizen in the IDE.
A lot of people today have two completely different systems when they build their game: one for code and one for content. Building content is a non-trivial task involving exporting, normalizing and processing content and then sequencing this with a relevant code build. We wanted to make this whole process simpler for enthusiasts so we have a pretty complete (and pluggable) content build system in XNA Game Studio Express. Michael talks about the content pipeline here.
But what good is a content pipeline without content? Well, buried away on the XNA Partners page is some links to some interesting things you might want to look at:
- Autodesk FBX SDK - SDK for handling FBX files.
- GarageGames Torque X - cool versions of their frameworks and tools using XNA Framework
- SOFTIMAGE |XSI MOD tool - build your own models for your games
- Turbo Squid - pick up some free models to prototype your game
I'm going to unlock the inner artist in me over the holidays and put some content through that pipeline.
Relatively old news (well 12 hours to be exact) but we shipped the first version of XNA Game Studio Express today. Michael has some information about it here.
Shipping always makes me a little reflective and I wanted to share the fact that I have been a PM at Microsoft for over 7 years and have worked on two products:
- C#
- XNA Game Studio Express
I've had a lot of the different PM positions on these teams but it's amazing that I have "only" worked on two products.
I joined the C# team as the first full-time PM working on the C# compiler. The team at the time was around 8 people, 4 developers and 4 QA. I remember thinking at the time about the responsibility of bringing a new programming language to the world and we worked hard over the years to make sure that we had a world class solution that developers loved.
A few years ago I started to look around for a new challenge inside Microsoft. I wasn't expecting to find something that would change things as fundamentally as C# but along came XNA. Yet again I was the first PM on the team and over the last two years we've done a lot of listening and learning from people in the game industry. Now we are releasing XNA Game Studio Express and I'm as proud of it as I was of C#.
One of the things I love about working on development tools or frameworks is that they provide a platform for you to build incredible things. Our new tag line "Your World, Your Game" really captures our intention with the product.
Everyone has a great game idea but most don't have the tools to build it. I hope that XNA Game Studio Express gives you the tools that allows you to build that game you have always wanted to build.
I always look forward to the Escapist, it's always well written and it has interesting topics. If you haven't seen it you should take a look.
I moved my main laptop over to Vista about two months ago and overall I'm really happy with the switch (I have been using Vista on my second machine for much longer on various builds available inside the company).
I really like Vista, it has major upgrades all over the place, way too many to list here. With every upgrade I not only see the major changes but I tend to pay attention to the smaller aspects that change how I work everyday. Some of the smaller things that I have noticed are:
- Renaming a file. Renaming a file in File Explorer only selects the file name and not the file extension. In XP when you rename the file, both the file name and file extension are selected so you have to carefully select just the file name before typing. Most of the time you are simply changing the file name so Vista makes this nice and easy.
- Moving files. On many occasions I move a bunch files from one folder to another. Sometimes I have multiple File Explorer windows open and they tend to overlap a lot. Vista now has a cool feature that shows you the destination as part of the drag animation, it certainly makes it clear where the files are going and whether they are being copied or moved.
- Networking. It's a lot simpler. I love the fact that when I go to a coffee shop or plug in at a hotel, it detects the network and presents me with a choice of network types (home, work, public) and adjusts the security settings based on what I choose.
- File Explorer Location Bar. I love the new explorer location bar! At first it was a little different from what I was used to but now I can't live without it. Its cool to be able to select a specific location in a path name without having to manually edit a path.
- Gaming. Gaming is vastly improved with Vista. I would rarely swap out from a game to do something in Windows XP because the overall performance when switching back and forth wasn't the best. This has dramatically improved in Vista, I now happily swap out on those long flight routes in Wow to check thottbot for information about the quests I am on.
I know a lot of these seem trivial but I've been really impressed by Vista. One of my machines has Windows XP on it and every time I swap to it I miss Vista type features.
I posted an entry on the XNA team blog about how XNA Game Studio Express won an award at the recent DEMMX awards.
Boyd and I had a lot of hassles actually getting there because of a unfortunate flight time and then delays at the airport. The hotel the awards were at was very nice but we had a really short stay in LA (less than 12 hours) so it was pretty rushed.
It was an interesting event, mixing music, TV and the games industry. An especially interesting part was two songs by Sandra Bernhard, I never knew she sang but it was a sign that this wasn't a normal "computer" type award ceremony.