Major Pain:I am looking at this as a business proposition so yes while this is good it is hardly a justification to create games for sale to a small niche market.
Keep in mind that the initial roll out of Zune development is
not intended for end-users. Much like when XNA GS 1.0 launched and there was no distribution for end-users on Xbox 360, the same is currently what has been stated for XNA GS 3.0 with the Zune. If business is your decision maker, then the Zune will not be something for you.
But that is exactly my point, why would I want to program for a device that doesnt have the market share. I don't see why people would want to expend time and energy on a device that costs more than a mobile phone and doesnt have market share.
To help grow that market share. iPod and Windows Mobile are both global platforms. The Zune hasn't even left the United States yet. And again at this point still, the Zune is not trying to be a business platform. It's going to be fun and potentially profitable in the longer term, but not right at launch.
I beg to differ on this point as the casual games market on mobiles is hugh. I believe the potential sales of casual games developed with an XNA on Windows mobile is hugh. I understand the argument of the hardware specs being different but that didnt stop Microsoft putting out Windows mobile or Windows Compact Edition which I believe XNA's runtime is based upon.
Sure it might easy to put out a framework based on the .NET CF geared towards Windows Mobile, but it's another thing to say that it works for all Windows Mobile devices. The extensive testing required to do that or even to provide a list of devices it works on would be tremendous.
So isn't this considered feedback on the CTP release? The feedback being Why is Zune support important to me in the first place and why was the development of 3.0 focusing so heavily on it instead of base level games development functionality for XBOX 360 and Windows platforms?
That's not what I meant. I was saying the reason you don't see other major features in the CTP was that the goal (from my perspective) was to gather feedback about the Zune development and the framework as it relates to the Zune. You have perfectly valid feedback about it. I was just answering your question regarding the apparent lack of other features and announcements.
To me the Zune platform functionality just seems like noise that is diluting XNA's original premise of developing games for the XBOX 360 and Windows platforms.
But remember that the primary goal of XNA is to make game creation easier in a broad sense. Not just for Xbox 360 and Windows. It's also to enable the "code once, build multiple times" idea that you can write a game to compile and run on two (and now three) platforms. I think that the Xbox is getting plenty of attention with the launching of Xbox LIVE Community Games later this year. Finally being able to get your Xbox 360 games to the end-users is a tremendous feature addition for that platform. So while the API might not be getting ramped up much for it, the Xbox is still getting attention.
I wouldn't consider this noise especially seeing the response from the non-development community. John Sedlak has counted (when I spoke to him about it last night) over 600 downloads of his Zune game. I just started counting mine today about four hours ago and have already received a few hundred downloads. And a lot of these are people coming from places like ZuneBoards and the like. People installing Visual C# Express and the CTP just to play some games on their Zune. I think it's a much more popular idea than most people would think.
It will also likely mean longer XNA version release cycles as the XNA team now has to support another platform and ensure backward compatibility as new versions of the Zune are released.
As of now all the Zunes are essentially the same. They run at pretty much identical speeds with the same resolution (all of them are 240x320). The only difference is the touch pad introduced for the second generation devices. As of now the track record, while short, looks like backwards compatibility isn't going to be an issue.
I really can't see the benefit it brings to XNA developers right now hence the questions.
Like I said there is still a big market. 11% of the MP3 player market is gigantic even if it is all in the United States right now. And even with the high requirements to use the CTP to deploy games, lots of non-developers are doing it already just to play these games. I think that market is worth tapping into whether for fun or (eventual) profit.
This is great. I wasnt aware that had been added to the 3.0 CTP as it wasnt in the ReadMe or FAQ. What other functionality is there in 3.0 apart from the Zune platform features ?
There's the new Media namespace which lets you load and play WMAs and MP3s as Songs. You have the MediaPlayer static class which controls the playback of these songs. There's a SoundEffect class you can use to load WAV files directly and play them back with some basic options (volume, pitch adjustment, panning, and a flag to loop the effect).
Obviously the requirement of VS 2008 has now added the ability to easily use all the new C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 features with your content pipeline and Windows XNA games. Hopefully they update the .NET CF on Xbox and Zune to include those, but at least Windows gets to use it now.
Other than that, I can't think of much else. Like I said the biggest thing in the CTP was the Zune support. There might still be something major waiting for RTM that didn't make the CTP, but we'll just have to wait and see.
