Hi,

Imagine that I already have a publisher for a full Xbox360 game project (that you can buy on a DVD in a gameshop). Is it possible to use XNA in this case ?

No, at this time, you cannot use the XNA Framework in games published to DVD.

If you already have a publisher, I'd say to talk to your account manager about this. I'm not sure there's anything definitive we can say here when it comes to professional titles.

I really have to wonder why. I mean, it seems in microsoft's intrest to create a dev environment that can be blanket-applied to the 360. By reducing it to only XBLA-scaled titles they're limiting its practicality. I'd imagine that having it be able to be used for standard 360 games would further the spread of XNA and, more importantly, C#.

The primary goal of the XNA Framework is to support indie developers, students, and hobbyists. In fact, the team that makes the XNA Framework is called the "Community Games Platform Team". Our team mission is not about supporting professional developers. Big commercial studios already have plenty of other tools they can use to make games, and other teams dedicated to supporting them, so they don't need us!

This is why the vast bulk of our effort goes into building things for the larger community (for instance letting anyone develop and publish games for Xbox), rather than focusing on existing professional studios.

On occasion we may do some work for professional studios, such as the special prototype we made to let Torpex Games publish Schizoid, or the Arcade Extensions we are building to enable XBLA games using the XNA Framework. This sort of thing is really only on an opportunistic basis, though: we might put some effort into it if the workload seems low enough and the reward seems worthwhile, but such things are not our primary mission and will rank much lower than our real work supporting community developers.

That said, if you have a publishing contract for a game that you would like to distribute on disk, please discuss this with your account manager. They can then work with us to figure out if there is anything we can do to help you. Public forums are not the appropriate place to discuss commercial publishing or business relationships.

TEMPVS MORTIS:

I really have to wonder why. I mean, it seems in microsoft's intrest to create a dev environment that can be blanket-applied to the 360. By reducing it to only XBLA-scaled titles they're limiting its practicality. I'd imagine that having it be able to be used for standard 360 games would further the spread of XNA and, more importantly, C#.

Seems odd you would assume that we decided to impose this limitation on purpose. What gave you the impression that "not possible at this time" means, "we do not allow it"? Developing a title to be published on DVD requires a broader set of development tools with more capabilities than we currently support in XNA Game Studio. It takes time and effort to convert even existing tools to suit our development environment. Until there is a good reason for us to do it, those tools will continue to not exist.

We haven't restricted anything; we just haven't enabled it yet.

But in a mannar of capability, and/or power of development, does the XNA offer the flexebility and power to make such a game? or its just a nice tool to play around?

c64days:

But in a mannar of capability, and/or power of development, does the XNA offer the flexebility and power to make such a game? or its just a nice tool to play around?

It's not a lack of power or flexibility or any of that preventing it. You are misinterpreting what Stephen said. The XNA team has simply yet to have a need to develop the method for running the games off of a DVD. The main purpose for XNA Game Studio was to spur hobbyist development which generally doesn't involve retail DVD games. So they simply haven't bothered to implement this yet. As can be inferred from Stephen's post, if there is a "good reason" (i.e. a ready-to-go XNA game with a publisher behind it) they would most likely start investigating and developing some system for running XNA games off of a DVD.

You will never see a Halo, GTA or even a relatively average full-price game built with XNA. Fact of the matter is, XNA is just not efficient and fast enough to perform the job well, in comparison to C++ and Assembly. C# may be different, you may be able to create such a game using C#, but XNA is not equipped for the job.

Although that EDF game looks like it could have been created with XNA, and my mates found it to be pretty good fun, for a few hours.

Ayatollah:

You will never see a Halo, GTA or even a relatively average full-price game built with XNA. Fact of the matter is, XNA is just not efficient and fast enough to perform the job well, in comparison to C++ and Assembly. C# may be different, you may be able to create such a game using C#, but XNA is not equipped for the job.

Although that EDF game looks like it could have been created with XNA, and my mates found it to be pretty good fun, for a few hours.

Let's try not dragging this conversation into the "capable" or "performance" topic, but to clear up confusion for when the next batch of beginners read this thread I must say that we have had that blanket statements like yours simply are not true. Not to mention you are comparing XNA (an API like DirectX) to languages like C++ and assembly. If you admit C# is fast enough to write such a game, then you have to allow XNA to be fast enough because it was written in C# (and some C++ for hooking up calls to DirectX I believe). The main fact of the matter is that nobody knows if C# with XNA is capable because nobody has really tried. Until someone makes really tries full game and does all the optimizations they can and all of that, we will not be able to say yes or no as to whether or not it's possible.

Ayatollah never specifically mentioned the XNA Framework, so I'm going to assume he meant the whole XNA Game Studio product, including the Xbox runtime environment.  In that regard, a certain AAA title may be possible on Windows (not yet proven) but not on Xbox (again, not proven) due to the limitations of the current version of the Xbox runtime environment for XNA Game Studio games.

What has been proven is the fact that the current Xbox runtime environment and code generator has known performance issues in some areas.  As an analogy, the current state of the Xbox code generator is like using gcc with minimal optimizations (no -Ox flag).  While this does not imply a good, quality XNA game on Xbox is impossible, it does imply you may experience trouble if your game has a large volume of CPU work.  This is something I can personally vouch for.

The important thing to keep in mind is that this could drastically change with future versions of XNA Game Studio.  While the Windows runtime environment is tied to the Desktop CLR team, the Xbox runtime environment is tied with the XNA Game Studio team (as far as I know).

Like Nick, I feel it is important to highlight facts, not speculation, so newcomers can easily find good sources of information.  To that end, I must respectfully disagree partially with Nick that no-one knows the limits because no-one has tried.  There are known limits with what you can currently do, as I have stated earlier.

ShawMishrak:

The important thing to keep in mind is that this could drastically change with future versions of XNA Game Studio.  While the Windows runtime environment is tied to the Desktop CLR team, the Xbox runtime environment is tied with the XNA Game Studio team (as far as I know).

I agree with the statement about the potential for future versions.

A small clarification: We partner with the .NET Compact Framework (NetCF) team to build the Xbox 360 CLR. What we run on Xbox 360 is a version of the NetCF that you see on other devices. The advances in the NetCF CLR will, for the time being, be fairly similar to advances in the NetCF CLR on other platforms. One slightly offsetting factor, though, is that we ship independently of the NetCF team's usual ship vehicle -- that is, they typically base their development schedule around Visual Studio, but we do not. That means we won't always have the same runtime features as other NetCF platforms.