So when I do something like:

 

 

I thought I could just type in my own text for the Presence. Am I tied to the strings inside of GamerPresenceMode?

Yes, since the Rich Presence is broadcast to all gamers (friends in your friend list etc) and Microsoft isn't doing the traditional certification process for games, they had to limit what presence was permitted by XBox Live Community Games. With a full publishing contract you of course will get the full rich presence experience but for community games they had to protect the world from what would have definitely been an abused system.

The main reason is that Presence information is visible by everyone no matter what parental controls are on the xbox. Therefore they MUST be rated 'E'. AS Geroge says - without a cert process there is no way to enforce this. So instead of not getting any access to the system we got this compromise.

You will note that the presence information still always says "Playing XNA Game" (or something like that) as the 1st line too.

Yes, I read all the information about the other lines for Rich Presence. The preset Presence information makes sense, I'm just glad we have any support at all. Thanks for the information.

I understand and agree with their reasoning, but many of the options they ahve given fit my modes. I would like to combine the enumeration together (not sure how this could be achieved) to produce say "Playing Online - Score 1000". This would give greater flexibility in my view. Is this something others would like to see?

Of course we would love to see some flexibility. The issue is simply how they can open up the flexibility without having to worry about the inevitable wave of obscenities that some developers would find humorous to put in there. Hopefully the rich presence will evolve over time, but definitely voice your opinions on Connect so the team know what people want. And with something like this (and most requests), try to be as detailed as possible about things so they know exactly what you want, why you want it, and perhaps even how you see the public API methods. All of this can really help the team in deciding future features.

George Clingerman:

Yes, since the Rich Presence is broadcast to all gamers (friends in your friend list etc) and Microsoft isn't doing the traditional certification process for games, they had to limit what presence was permitted by XBox Live Community Games. With a full publishing contract you of course will get the full rich presence experience but for community games they had to protect the world from what would have definitely been an abused system.

 

And that's when it destroyed my dream of making some "hello world" program named "gears of war 2 beta rc2031" and say "act 4 - riding brumak" on a rich presentation to fool my xbox buddies..

 

but...... sigh..... :-)