Developing games and applications for Xbox 360 using XNA* *XNA is XNA’s Not Acronymed An Introduction by Peter Messenger Senior Developer at QMASTOR Newcastle Coders Group Presentation – 2 nd August

Developing Games Using XNA XNA is a set of tools that facilitates computer game development and management. – Simplifies Graphics, Audio, Input, Networking and Storage Can develop games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune – It attempts to promote code re-use across target platforms First preview Mar 2006, released Dec 2006 – Version 2.0 Dec 2007, 3.0 Oct Current

Why Use XNA? Could develop games in Flash, Silverlight/WPF or Iphone but….. – XNA technology built from the ground up to Enable code reuse and reduce repetitive development Facilitate rapid and simple development for games – Large user base 30 million units sold 20 million Xbox Live users 26 Countries – Tutorials for all aspects of development – Microsoft provide all the hosting and distribution

XNA Example Game Many example games available online with full source code.

How I Learnt about XNA Saw a demonstration at Microsoft Tech Ed in September 2008 – Interested as it was already using platform that I was experienced with – Could see applications outside of game development – simple training tools Developed my first application in Mar 2009 – Based on exercise website for people with spinal cord injury for Sydney Hospitals

Game Development XNA Game Studio 3.1 released March 2009 Runs as part of Visual Studio 2008 or free Visual C# 2008 Express Edition Based on NET Compact framework 2.0 Supports C#, LINQ Downloadable from the XNA Creators Club website

XNA Creators Club

Download software, tutorials, forums and the like Post your creations have them peer reviewed and approved for Xbox Live. – Over 400 games developed to date. – Requires licence $US 99 per year for Xbox 360 distribution – Can sell games for 200, 400 or 800 points – developer gets 70% of total revenue (about $ $9.20 per sale) – Windows applications incur no licence fee

Developing Your Game Application Consists of Methods Initialization – Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic related content. Load Content – LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load all of your content Unload Content – UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload all content. Update – Allows game to run logic such as updating world, checking for collisions, gathering input and playing audio Draw – This is called when the game should draw itself.

Developing Your Game Content such as XML, fonts, images, sounds and music get converted in binary XNB files – Requires writing code to encode/decode XML, convert images into spritesheets etc – Examples of this can be found in tutorials on creators club While there is no “canvas” like in web applications and Silverlight, there is many example code bases that get you started

Developing Your Game Can link into Xbox Live and network between users Use keyboard, mouse or controller Interfaces for keyboard, game saving and loading built in via GamerServices module Can debug/publish on Windows/Xbox 360 much like any other Visual Studio application Once complete, Windows applications can be distributed using Click Once technology via a website if desired

Demonstration Show example of XNA application Discuss code

Using Xbox 360 for Applications Many issues make this difficult – Cannot network to outside servers – Lack of “standard” keyboard can make design challenging – Limited interface for data entry Many developers have built their own XNA open source data entry frameworks to get around this. Best example of this is xWinForms

xWinForms

Conclusion XNA is worthwhile investigating if you are a gaming enthusiast or want to be an independent developer Application development probably better handled using Silverlight/WPF – Very much depends on your business objectives – Silverlight likely to be available on Xbox 360 in the future Questions and answers?