Here's an article on FoxBusiness that some of you might find interesting:

XBox360 Article on FoxBusiness

Quote:

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New York -- Calling all recruits: Microsoft wants you—to create video games.

Aiming to build the number of homegrown games available on Xbox 360, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft announced earlier this week it will soon start letting Xbox LIVE members play, rate and share games created by the community. (Xbox LIVE is an Internet multiplayer game service by Microsoft.)

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This may be old news, but I thought some of you might be interested in it.

Not old news, since they just announced it on the 20th.

My understanding is that it works much like the YouTube model. You create your game with XNA, it gets judged by other XNA creators, then anybody with a LIVE account can download it.

They haven't announced all the details yet but, AFAIK, you have to have a Gold LIVE account to play ($50 a year). To publish, you need to join the Creator's Club (additional $99 a year). And there *may* be an additional charge to subscribe to Creator Club Content (they haven't said much about that yet).

Also, you don't get money when somebody downloads your game. But you will get fame and honor.

BTW: They also announced that it would work with the Zume (I guess the 10 people with Zume are excited about that ).

Compare A7 with XNA Game Stuio 2.0, which one is easier in terms of coding, workflow?

And which one costs more. (by free software fanatic!)

All good questions. Sadly, I don't have any good answers.

Ease-of-use:
XNA-GS uses C# (simplified C++).
A7 uses Lite-C (simplified C).

Workflow:
A7 comes with tools for level, model, and scripting.
XNA-GS no asset creation tools, but you can code your own converters using XNA-Build.

Cost:
XNA-GS is free for the basic version.
A7 is free for the basic version.
The commercial versions of A7 are posted on our web-site ($59-$899).
The commercial versions of XNA-GS are not listed.

Is XNA-GS offer similar engine function like A7?

And performance wise, compare lite-C and C#, which one is execute faster and less resource overhead? I think C# is run on .net and there should have memory overhead for Just-in-time compiler.

I'm currently working with XNA and Torgue X Builder (for 2D games).
To test them on my XBox, i had to get the XNA Creaters Club Abo, which is 49 for 4 month and 99 for 12 month.
I didn't have to buy a XBox Live Gold account, maybe that's just for sharing the games (which i didn't try yet).

XNA GameStudio is free to use and it's kinda easy to create games with it. The workflow is nice in programing and audio management, but of course you have no level or model editor.

The good thing is that you can script your game once and use it both for windows and xbox.

Torque X Builder is exactly like Torque Game Builder. The workflow is awesome and it's super easy to create games with it.

I really like the fact to test my games on the Xbox360, especially with the controller and it's features like vibration

Though i did no real game with it yet, i played around a lot, created normal movements, added audio, made two player modus (with 2 controller, no network yet) and some other stuff and its really fun.

I would suggest you to get the XNA GameStudio and try it by yourself for Windows only maybe, i think you don't have to pay for anything then.

If you need tools to create games via XNA then perhaps Blade3D would be the way to go:

http://www.blade3d.com/

It is a development environment for XNA game creation. Beta 2 was just released and is free to all people that register with the Blade3D site. According to their forum, the final release will be very inexpensive, but we will have to see what they come up with.

Thanks for the link, it looks very interesting indeed The scene editor is looking so good.

I tried both ogre and XNA and the syntax and the game api are easier to use on XNA.
The community is huge and there is plenty of tutorial (even to build your own game engine)
http://www.thehazymind.com/

this one is really good to begin.

http://www.riemers.net/

and plenty of blog

anyway since it's free you should just try it you'll see.

a lot of wrapper are existing and you can find them on codeplex