Last time I talked a little about Microsoft’s XNA at EnergizeIT. Jean Beauclair, who is part of Microsoft Canada’s “Developer Evangelist team”, made a comment about XNA that when it was first announced, major game companies that produce AAA games didn’t take XNA seriously. They thought of it as a “toy” that’s only for hobbyists and amateurs and that it didn’t have a place within the professional industry. In fact, the first line in the XNA Game Studio Express documentation specifically says:

Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express is a set of tools based on Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition that allow students and hobbyists to build games for both Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360.

After several months of being released and people (i.e. hobbyists, students, and the like) actually started using it and produced some games, things are kind of changing now. Game companies are noticing XNA, according to him… really…? I don’t think game companies will immediately switch to XNA if it’s considered an amateur’s tool. And to develop a title across more than one console platform, XNA is out of the question for obvious reasons. Oh, and just as an aside: I see the term “cross-platform” being thrown around a little bit when Microsoft is referring to XNA. This is kind of misleading as it is not cross-platform across consoles, rather it’s cross-platform only across a Windows PC and Xbox360. Ugh.

So my main issue with using XNA is that it’s made by Microsoft. By using XNA I’ll be tied down to developing only for Windows and/or Xbox 360. I’ll admit that I am a little bit of a Nintendo fanboy. If Nintendo ever does open up the DS or Wii for hobbyists to develop for, I’ll be jumping on the wagon without a second thought. Also, I can forget about satisfying the Linux crowd. My second concern is that I won’t get a chance to hone my OpenGL skills. After finishing Chariot of Fire, I just felt like I was just getting started with OpenGL. With those being said, I really should put things into better perspective:

1. Majority of PCs out there is over 90% +/- a few percentage. Big audience, yes. But really I shouldn’t be caring about this; I’m better off in the short run to produce something a few people would enjoy.
2. Game ideas and mechanics are the meat. It doesn’t matter what platform it runs on as long as it works the same across them. Porting, although can be a lot of work, is doable. But coming up with good game ideas is harder. I should be prototyping, not productioning.
3. Based on the U of T Computer Science curriculum, it appears that there’s a dying number of students with C/C++ skills being produced. I like to think of myself as one of the rare students who knows C++ like the back of their hand and show off. But compared to some of the newer programming languages like Python and Java, there’s less overhead involved in these languages than C++. Garbage collection, pointers being dealt with seamlessly, and built-in data structures and libraries are things which, I guess, are being taken for granted in the newer languages and using them would reduce coding time.
4. I want to get a working demo done in about a month from now just in time for the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference

I’ve briefly looked at the documentation and wow, it takes so much less code to get an XNA app (which I think is a layer above DirectX9) running than it did with classic DirectX9 using C++. The framework even provides a base class with all the required methods to implement that’s typical of a game app. XNA includes a math library along with some support for curves, sweet. I was doing a little bit of experimenting with bezier and b-spline curves recently but never got around to finishing it…

So considering these points, I’m gonna bite the bullet and dive into XNA for a little while. Congrats Microsoft, you pwn me. Sigh.

I always thought that the email one registers for a .NET passport/Windows Live ID was permanent and that you can’t change it. But today I was surprised to find that you can. So for those who’re using still using their abandoned Hotmail email address(es) just for MSN Messenger, you can now change it to your current email address at https://account.live.com

Today Microsoft Canada held their 2nd annual EnergizeIT! event today at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre. I have to confess that I planned to go just for the free swag… mainly the free Office 2007 Professional give away.

A friend told me about EnergizeIT and dragged me to go, so I signed up. Then I got two emails from Microsoft shortly after registering: one which was just the sign up confirmation and another with news about the Office 2007 give away. The only thing I had to do in order to get it was to attend another Microsoft event prior to this one entitled TechNet: Future of your server room, which was held a few weeks ago on May 30th, also at the Convention Centre, and get an “EnergizeIT passport card” to redeem today. The May 30th event was mainly IT oriented – focused on Windows Server and the like – so I didn’t have much interest in attending the event. I ended up going to it in the morning, registered, got my passport card, and left for school… and went to today’s event and got a license key for Office 2007 Pro.

The EnergizeIT event kicked off this morning with quite a handful of Microsoft t-shirt give aways and the audience was excited, roaring and responsive to it. What a way to start a Saturday morning at 9:30 AM. A lot of people went up near the stage to grab the t-shirts as the speakers and crew threw them around the room. I managed to grab one but unfortunately it was an XL size (I wear something between S to M). The morning keynote speakers talked about security and virtualization, with virtualization being a hot topic these days thanks to the multiprocessor and multicore CPUs coming out of Intel and AMD.

Then lunch came, free courtesy of Microsoft of course. The food wasn’t bad – a sandwich, one cookie, an apple, and pop – but hey it’s free food. By the time I got my lunch I already saw a huge line-up to the EnergizeIT passport booth for people to get their licensed copies of Office 2007. The waiting time to get to the front of the line was probably about 30-40 minutes by then, and it was almost time for the afternoon sessions to start at 12:30 pm so I left and came back a couple hours afterwards when there wasn’t any line.

And finally, here’s the game development part of this. This year’s event had a session catered towards gamers and gamedev’ers which Microsoft calls GameCamp and considering there wasn’t any other sessions that interests me more, my entire afternoon was spent there. I recalled one of the two young (my age more or less) guys who were running the session from a previous Microsoft GameCamp event that happened last November at the MaRS building near U of T. At the previous GameCamp, Microsoft introduced their new XNA and the XNA Game Studio Express product, with a live demo and tutorial of how to use it. I expected them to do something similar today too, which they did, albeit some technical difficulties. Just briefly for those who don’t know, XNA is a new game library based on .NET and probably the best feature of XNA is that you can write an app using C# and XNA, and be able to compile and run it on an Xbox360 without any porting or changes to be made… at least in theory. I don’t know if it’s intended to replace the DirectX API in the future though.

The afternoon was structured so that you can pick any four different sessions to go to, with a 10 minute break in between. The GameCamp sessions all “built on each other”, so each session was different. If I remember correctly, the sessions were in order:

1. A brief intro to XNA, how to program a game, and a live tutorial creating an Asteroids clone (almost from scratch). They also showed off a nice professional-looking racing game demo, creatively named Racing Game“. Maybe they should try and get a trademark for that . The demo was supposedly made in 3 weeks, and it had some nifty graphics and textures. It also had effects like HDR rendering, and glaring, in addition to the physics. As for the tutorial, since I already know the basics, everything was straight forward and I knew what they were presenting. But there were a handful of high school kids there as well, and I’m not sure if they got the message; hopefully the gist of it and enough to get motivated to start.
2. The second part was a community demo and presentation of XNA-made games. All the guys who presented were participants of this year’s TOJam back in early May. I wanted to participate myself but alas, I had two exams the following day. One team, whom I knew were also from Computer Science at U of T, participated in TOJam, used XNA and demoed their game today.
3. The third and fourth sessions were mainly talks from industry specialists, experts and followed by Q&A. A University of Western Ontario (UWO) Professor gave a talk about game development, and apparently he heads a course in game development in their curriculum, or something… I haven’t been able to find much info about it at UWO’s website.

Like always, there were some prizes to give out courtesy of Microsoft. They drew out a couple of names out of a raffle in between sessions, and made the two lucky people beat each in Asteroids, and later the Racing Game, using a DDR Dance pad! Probably is harder than it seems. I think most of the prizes given away were all the different versions of Vista from Home to Ultimate.

For me, overall the GameCamp sessions were okay. There wasn’t anything interesting or new to be excited about but it did sort of bring me a little closer to consider learning XNA (more on this later). My main complaint about the GameCamp sessions was that the presentations were a bit amateurish, but that’s probably due to the second part where it was a community demo presentation done by TOJam participants, and not your usual Microsoft speaker, so this comment doesn’t really count. There were some technical problems getting the participants’ laptops to display on the projector, and IM(Naive)O, that probably made the audience feel a little not-so-confident about the whole thing. Luckily one of the the TOJam organizers was there to fill in the empty awkward air, talked a little bit about TOJam and answered questions from the audience while the presenters fiddled with their laptops trying to get the display working on the projector – a very good idea to do if you or your team ever run into tech difficulties while presenting.

Usually I find that people from Microsoft who give talks always do a really good job at it. They probably have some really good training programs there to train employees to present and speak. Like I said earlier, since the two guys running the GameCamp session were about my age, I do think they have a little room for improvement in terms of making it “more professional”. But overall they did a good job, way better than me that’s for sure.