Developing solely on the XBox 360

XNA Game Studio Express

Pekuja

What major disadvantages are there in developing only on an XBox 360 My laptop here is not exactly a top-of-the-line gaming machine, which means that I can't run XNA games on it (no shaders). One option would be to just get a new PC, but for a student that's not exactly cheap, and I might not want to get a new one anyways before Vista comes out.
One thing I heard might be a problem is profiling my code. I understand the only thing for profiling on the 360 is the GC profiler, which might not be quite enough. Will the situation get better in the future
Should I just get a new PC or would the 360 be a good inexpensive solution for game development

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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

waruwaru

If you are targetting Xbox anyways, it's not too bad to dev with xbox alone. The disadvantages that I can think of are:

- you have to be signed into Live the whole time

- depending on your devlopment habbit, if you are the type of person who writes 3 lines of code, and run it, it can be a little tidius (build, deploy to box, run, exit..etc). if you can dev without actually running the code (just change, build, repeat), then it's not too bad

- if you don't have wireless set up, you have to be tethered to your xbox/switch/router the whole time...

If you plan to get into pc xna game dev, might want to start saving up for a new computer.





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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Johnnylightbulb

How'a bout this solution:

http://www.nuclex.org/articles/using-the-reference-rasterizer-in-xna

You'll have slow graphics, but it will run on your laptop...


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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Pekuja

Well I doubt any of those will be a big problem. I wasn't aware that you need to be connected to Live all the time though. Does that mean that if your Internet connection is down, you can't deploy software to your 360
What I really would like to know is if there are limitations in debugging and profiling your code. I would think that might be a problem, but then again I saw the video where Frank Savage shows off setting breakpoints and stepping on the 360, so I have some hope that the tools are there. Are they



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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Stephen Styrchak - MSFT

Yes, you must be signed-in to Live the entire time that you are running XNA Game Launcher on your Xbox 360. That definitely implies that you cannot deploy or debug games while your internet connection is down.

The profiler for NetCF on the Xbox 360 is somewhat rudimentary. It provides performance counter information which is useful for identifying some types of performance issues, but not others. This shouldn't be a blocking issue to getting started, since profiling isn't a necessary step in developing a game.

The managed debugger for the Xbox 360 supports nearly all the same features as the desktop debugger. The main things it doesn't support are debugger visualizers and edit-and-continue. While those things are nice, a lot of people don't know what they are and won't miss them at all. For more information about the Xbox 360 debugger, refer to this page.

--Stephen


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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Kyle0654

Sorry to drag this up, but this has been bugging me for a little while...

I'm overseas without my Xbox, but I'm developing some stuff with XNA that could really use my Xbox to run on (my laptop just isn't cutting it), so I was considering having it sent. I still have a functioning Live account, and I could have a Creator's Club membership downloaded to my Xbox and ensure it works before it was sent. However, the internet connection I'm on here is heavily firewalled / proxied / etc., so I wouldn't be able to connect to the internet with my Xbox 360.

Assuming the Xbox was set up to run XNA before it was sent here (and would therefore know about my subscription), why wouldn't I be able to deploy to it over a local network I know that the arcade games can be played if you've signed in with the account you bought them with (even if you aren't logged into Xbox Live), so what's the difference, aside from the subscription length Is there any way this might be changed in the near future to enable developers without a connection to Live to still develop XNA games for the Xbox 360




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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Nick Gravelyn

I too want to know why the decision to require Live for all deploys and builds. Even something like having to log on to live every month or every week would be fine, but here at school, our internet connections don't support consoles (and sharing the internet from my PC doesn't seem to work) because of authorization pages I have to log into. It'd be nice if I could take it home on the weekends, reauthorize my Xbox 360 or whatever it's called and be fine for the week until the next weekend.

Can anyone shed light on simply why the decision to require Live at all times



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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Shawn Hargreaves - MSFT

This is primarily for security reasons. As I'm sure you can imagine, the ability to run arbitrary code on the Xbox is pretty scary from a platform security perspective, so it is critically important for us to make sure there is no way to exploit our software. Requiring a Live connection makes things much more robust in this department, most significantly because this guarantees that if anyone ever does find an exploit in XNA, we can be sure of instantly patching it through a title update, but also because of a bunch of cool security features built into Live itself.




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Re: XNA Game Studio Express Developing solely on the XBox 360

Stephen Styrchak - MSFT

Actually, the most straightforward reason is that the subscriptions to use the XNA Game Launcher are not free.

If you didn't have to connect to Live, we would not be able to tell if you had a valid subscription. If we didn't validate the subscription every time, then you could just cancel your subscription after you installed everything and continue using it for free.

I'm not saying that any of you would ever consider running software without a license, but there are people who would.

--Stephen


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