Xdk

#1 Well first most of the time Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have to be sure that you are a capable studio, if you are just one person I am pretty sure getting an sdk for their consoles would be a slim chance, though it's not hard to sign up to be a developer.

Also this is why we have people called "publishers".....they are essentially the people who get your game on the shelves, also many times people seem to need the explanation that you can't just "port" a game....it can be a tedious process because basically you have to optimize the game to work with the controller and also try to get the best performance out of the system.

Though any of these things are not really impossible.

#2 Without going through the extremely expensive certification process, you would not be able to release anything that you create with the XDK into free or retail channels. Part of the licensing that you agree to, as well as the NDA process, dictates what you can and cannot do with what you create using the XDK. One of those things is not releasing anything until given the green light. And that process is a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than licensing the XDK.

#3 I understand all of that but technically speaking if i could port a game through the xbox development kit could i run it on an unmodifed xbox without microsofts signed key?

#4 Why not port your game into XDK, write the game ISO to CD and try it out on your XBox 360.. then come back here and tell us of your success or failure.. then we all will know for sure if doing it is worth all the effort and expense of dealing with Mirosoft ?

What I mean is that sometimes the community doesn't have the answer, and you may have to Pioneer.. Go where no man has gone before.. Make it So ! =)

#5 I don't know if you could or not, but regardless, you could not legally distribute it without it. And with such intentions, I'm sure you would be invalidating any licensing you signed with Microsoft to receive an XDK. Unless you stole it off a truck, in which case, the problems are larger than a simple licensing issue.

#6 Well, can you use the XNA option, you don't need a dev kit or anything, from what I hear you just need to subscribed to the XNA creators club.

#7 Yea i stopped using xna for a minute but im using it again. im really not trying to distribute anything but i think xna is the best choice. what im not sure about is if i'll need to be logged into xbox live anytime i want to actually play the game. i'm doing this as a hobby for now until i go to school for game programming but i told myself i dont want to make a game unless i can put it on a console.

#8 I hear ya, having your game running on a nice tv with an actual game controller would seem pretty gratifying. Though I am not jumping up with glee that I might have to buy a 360 just to have a good game, but I am not expecting for PSN for PS3 to follow suit.

#9 Never mind i take it back. xna is a ripoff. they make you pay 99 dollars a year to use it. and they make you think you gettin a deal by chargin 49 dollars for four months but thats 150 by the end of the year. the only thing you can do for free is build a computer game and you can do that with torque or any other engine. i'm using openxdk now and i'm having success with it too. microsoft is trying to screw you over with xna. either you will have to use openxdk and preferrably softmod your xbox or bootleg micrsofts official xkd like i did

#10 Oops...

#11 I meant 49.99

#12 I thought the oops was you telling us all you bootlegged microsofts xdk :)

#13 Yeah offering developers an inexpensive and legal way to get their games into the console marketplace is such a scam.

#14 Hell yea it is when they tell you its free. if they told me about the price upront maby i could save up but since they want to suprise me with it i'm not even prepared. and why would i want to code a computer game when i'm most likely already using a game engine to develop programs as a game designer?

#15 They didn't spring anything on you like a trap. There aren't any "hidden costs". They're extremely upfront about deploying to the 360.


Of course, if you use something like the free homebrew XDK, you'll have to do a complete engine rewrite anyway if you ever really want to get it onto the 360 officially. Or if you use the XDK and the non-retail console that you have no-doubt acquired, I doubt that you will get any cert support from the official XBox dev channels.

The hombrew world is a great place to learn to work with hardware since many of the people who have created homebrew kits have done some amazing work. But it doesn't get you very far if you want to make the transition to the official XDK.

And even if you license an engine, you're going to find yourself fist deep in coding a game, usually on a computer to be deployed to your console. Which is one of the functions of the official SDK tools for console developers as well as middleware providers for console development.

#16 Im not using the official xdk. i want to put my game out for other people to play so i decided to do everything legal but i dont have any money for xna right now and i doubt if i did i would pay 100 dollars a year. so i'm either going to use openxdk or the psp toolchain which i think i can use without having to modify the psp but i'm not sure. i'm also considering the ps2 but that all depends on which one requires the least modification of the console. and of course the game i put out for free will have to be a pc game since i cant expect everyone to mod their console just to play my game. the console game will be just for me to play and anyone else who's already modded whatever console i put my game on.

#17 I believe you will have to flash your PSP bios for homebrew dev since it often uses the same bios hacks and hooks as UMD ROM pirates.

Are you looking at creating a bridge technology between your PC engine and your homebrew Xbox/PSP engine? That could lead to a lot of headaches. I speak from experience since I've been playing with bridge tech between Unity's implementation of C# under mono and TX. Nothing big, just testing. But in many ways, some of what I want to do it extremely engine-hook specific and would probably be easier to implement in each engine separately, though just as horrible to maintain.

#18 To the price thing. XNA is an amazing gift to game developers - the fact that you need a subscription is a -GOOD- thing.

I don't want to imagine how much crap the XBOX Live Arcade team would have to sift through to get good games on to the service if it was free. If you aren't willing / don't have the money for XNA you aren't capable of making a good console game anyway - enough said.

To expand, it used to be that for console development if you had to ask how much it cost to get a game on to a console you couldn't afford it. Seriously if money is an issue, console development is not for you.

#19 What does money have to do with capabilities. i could be the best game designer in the world using open source game engines. if you think all it takes to make a good game is to throw out a bunch of money on software than maby you aren't capable of making a good game and you need to consider another field that requires no talent. and just incase you didnt know console development is possible on a low budget. i believe its called homebrew. go look it up.

#20 Most of the commercial engines i've tried are drag and drop. all the open source engines require work just to put it together let alone use it. if you do have the money to afford the higher end game engines then your getting your money's worth with a game engine thats very easy to use with little to no programming required. if you cant afford those engines than i would assume you were more capable then anybody who could simply because you had to do alot more to get you game running. setting up ogre3d is twice as hard as torque because torque cost money and ogre is free. try going from a drag and drop game engine to console development and tell me who's more capable. - enough said.