Xdk

#21 Willie I advise you consider who you are talking to. I'm an established game developer at the age of 18 - read I make enough money from game development that I don't need any other job to pay rent / expenses.

My skill is not in question here - yours obviously is.

I also well aware of the home brew scene, however, if you want to be successful in the BUSINESS of video games you have to do things correctly. Game development for consoles is not a hobby, the standards the console manufacturers expect are beyond an amateur's level to deliver.

Making a true console game is completely and totally impossible without some limited budget which damn well be able to afford a measly $100. Our are you promising your team (you do have a team don't you?) payment which you don't have.

Game development takes money, skill, passion, and hard work. If you lack even one you will fail.

Now get over yourself and take your pirating behind someplace where someone cares.

#22 Homebrew doesn't make you a pirate. An eye-patch and wooden leg would suggest otherwise, however.

#23 "bootleg micrsofts official xkd like i did"

Does, however, so yes he is a pirate and I have no patience for them.

#24 Oh really what games have you developed? what game engines have you licensed cause from what i see your using torque game engine. i assumed established game developers with teams and what not could afford more than a 100 dollar game engine. look around on the homebrew forums and ask them how much they had to pay to run openxdk on their xbox. all they needed was the money for the xbox computer and the adapter to hook them together. quit posing your not an established game developer and you probably live with you mom. you have no skills you want to believe you do and if you were somebody i should "consider" before i talk to then i wouldnt be talking to you on this forum. get a life and get off my thread.

#25 It's hard to tell if Willie is just really ignorant or a comedic genius. Either way... lol.

#26 This thread has become useless with its drop into pointless flaming about development prowess. If it doesn't take a positive slant I'm going to lock it. We don't need to read something that sounds like ten year olds engaged in a pissing contest. I saw enough of that in my five odd years as a mod on GameFAQs.

I'm not sure what game engines you have been seeing that are drag and drop, but nothing that I've seen in the large-scale commercial sector fits that description. Many have a nicer artist workflow, but even Hero, Unreal 3, id Tech 5, and Source are not "drag and drop". Of course, they are also priced for serious teams that will have programmers--serious programmers--who will breathe code so that they do not look like complete idiots when they open a high-cost support ticket. In the indie sector, Unity, GameCore, and DX Studio are the closest to drag-and-drop, and all require programming logic. GameMaker (and perhaps BYond) is probably the closest when it comes to a drag-and-drop, no-programming required engine. Most of the really impressive games on the YoYo Games site dipped pretty heavily into GML, though.

OGRE, Irrlicht, Saeurbraten, etc are not really any harder to setup than Torque. Each one is a somewhat different engine mentality structurally, but there really is not a free = difficult paradigm at work here. The Unreal 3 and Source engines are tightly-coupled engines in their source code and can be extremely difficult for programmers to parse and work with. They have a great artflow, which has much to do with the engine developers' catering to the mod community to keep their game (and their licensed engines) in the spotlight longer. Mod communities kept Half-Life alive far longer than most other games of its era and are extremely important.

#27 Ogre is much harder to setup than torque and i would expect it to be. if i'm paying money for it then it should at least be a little more user friendly. i've used them both and torque was alot easier to get running. most commercial engines are drag and drop until you want to customize it for different features but the basic functions are built in on engines like neoaxis where you dont neccessarily have to code unless you want to. most open source game engines dont give you a choice.

#28 NeoAxis is a nice engine that requires some .Net heavy lifting. I've only played with the demo and the non-commercial SDK. They've got a pretty nice engine going there. But it is still quite a ways from drag-n-drop and a make game button. All of your game logic is programmed in a .net language and then those script segments can be attached to objects in your game. This is a nice sandbox approach that many engines are heading towards, but not all. If you're looking at it from an artflow perspective rather than a programming perspective, then I can easily see how the "drag and drop" are the aspects that make the engine pop in your mind. But if you're looking to make a full game, you're going to need some talented .Net programmers for NeoAxis to refine and debug and optimize your gameplay just like you'll need some talented C++ programmers if you're working with the full Unreal 3 engine. That is, unless everything in your game can be done as a mod with a lot of UnrealScript heavy lifting and you are only leveraging the engine license for publication purposes. Most likely you'll still want a lot of C++ heavy lifting for tuning your game, however.

OGRE is a great rendering engine, and there are a number of other engines that use its renderer (NeoAxis for example). OGRE (and the vast majority of engines whether free or expensive commercial engines) is a programmer-centric engine. Torque is in many ways as well. The Quake engines are, too. If you've ever perused the source code to any of the Quakes then you know what I'm talking about. Different engines tailor more to the artflow. Unreal is a great example of an engine that has a pleasant (mostly) artflow and is definitely programmer-centric in terms of in-engine coding. Unity, one of my favorite indie-priced engines, is extremely artist-friendly. However, there's quite a bit of programmer savvy needed to make a high-end optimized game in Unity regardless of the wonderful artflow.

Money doesn't necessarily equate to user-friendly, though, and it really shouldn't. It's a nice plus, but the cost of licensing, legalese, having a "name" engine can be valid reasons for picking up the engine as well. Real-Time in-engine editing and manipulation can be a large time-saver and has often been relegated to third-party middleware solutions to provide in the industry in the past. It is refreshing to see that some of these tools are being implemented first-party as engine tech moves forward. I remember the general awe when I attended a ProDG pitch at the short-lived GDC roadtrips series in Boston when they were showing their real-time level tools for the N64 that they helped develop with Nintendo (as well as a very cool presentation by Michael Moriarty). We've come a long way, but people often take "ease" for granted and often expect it even when the industry isn't always providing it.

If you look at Saeurbraten, you'll see a nicely polished FPS/RPG engine (the RPG portion is still strongly in-progress) that has excellent in-game multiplayer level editing. It's a great sandbox to play with. Creating MD2 models outside of Milkshape and working through their .cfg files can be somewhat of pain, but it's a great engine that is free and oriented towards strong workflow. But it was designed to be a strong FPS engine, and that's where its strength and orientation lie. It doesn't mean that you couldn't adapt it to, say, a third-person adventure game; but it would require some engine refactoring.

#29 Maby drag and drop isnt really the word i'm looking for. what i'm really trying to say is comercial engines give you the option to approach from an artist prospective rather than a programmer (if you want to). i've seen alot of engines that try to draw you in by sayin you dont need any programming knowlege to get it up and running but thats only to draw you in so you can buy it. the easiest part of open source is setting up a prebuilt package but if that options not available building it from the source code can be hell. commercial engines are usually set up already and most of the hard work comes in when you actually get to making the game. i'm not saying they dont have a programming approach at all but torque and neoaxis only have to be installed to get a basic demo up and running and from there the level of difficulty depends on what your trying to do. I'll admit programming for ogre is alittle bit easier than torque script but setting it up to get to that point is hell depending on how you try to set it up.

#30 A lot of very expensive commercial engines are not artist friendly at all; at least not in the way that NeoAxis and Unity and GameCore are. That's why major companies often hire tool programmers with strong experience to get artwork out of, say Max or Maya, and into their proprietary engine. It lets the artists use the program that they know and they have a strong set of guidelines for setting up nodes correctly to be parsed by the engine. For example, the Final Fantasy XII engine (it may have been X, though) used separate named layers for collision meshes and LOD so that Maya level designers could not only work completely within Maya, but could then export out the level and test collision in-engine quickly and easily. They could also test whether or not nodes were active depending on the type, visibility and debug modes. They were also working under extreme constraints due to the PS2 platform. The toolchain would let them know when they had surpassed the engine's abilities. This is not uncommon in major houses that build their own engine tech. Of course, unlike Epic and id, they usually do not license *out their tech. Supporting your own toolchain for your product and future products by your team or internal teams is one thing. Trying to support other people's projects and workflows is hell. You can create policies for workflow within your organization, but they become "best practices" or at least "hopeful practices" on the support side as soon as they move beyond your walls.

A good tool programmer can take your engine and game a long, long way and are often the unwanted jobs in a company and *very* often the unsung heroes of the success of a titles milestones. People never see the fruits of their labor unless they are released as seemingly obfuscated command line tools that work extremely well in the context of the full project but not nearly as well when the mod community gets ahold of them and wants fancy widgets.

EDIT: *clarification

#31 No i dont mean unreal or anything like that. i havent tried those engines to give any input on them. i just mean engines that i can afford. I'd honestly preffer the approach as a programmer as long as there is some kind of documentation to get me started.

#32 1.Develop for XNA on Windows.
2.Once you have a somewhat polished game, buy a license to use it on the 360.
3.Upload.
4.Get MS interested.
5.???
6.Fame.

#33 OpenXDK isn't pirating according to this

WIKI DESCRIPTION
OpenXDK is a legal, open source development system for the Microsoft Xbox game console. When programming software for the Xbox, developers have two choices. The officially supported method, the Microsoft XDK, can only be acquired by developers with a license from Microsoft. However, OpenXDK presents a legal and freely usable alternative. Whereas the OpenXDK is freely available, downloading or using the XDK without a license is illegal. Programs signed by the Microsoft XDK are illegal to use without proper license, and the resulting binaries cannot be distributed without a proper license from Microsoft. Programs written using OpenXDK, however, are legal and can be made available on the Internet for people to download as OpenXDK incorporates no code from Microsoft.

Although OpenXDK is free to use, it creates its own problems because it cannot compile traditional XDK code, and converting a program from the usual XDK-compatible code to OpenXDK would require an entire rewrite. OpenXDK compiles code differently and is completely alienated from the Microsoft XDK.

Though it seems it's for the original xbox, not 360

#34 Just to note in case you weren't following the whole topic, the context of his post wasn't OpenXDK. It was a bootlegged copy of the official XDK.

Quote:bootleg micrsofts official xkd like i did

He's since decided not to go that route, though.

#35 Oh well, I thought since he mentioned OpenXDK it was his topic.

#36 That place where he mentioned it was where he decided to take that route versus the bootlegged XDK route. No worries, though. The whole topic has snaked around quite a ways from the beginning.

#37 I may consider xna one day. i'm gettin some soundtracks placed for a tv show but any money i make from producing is going to my school first. after that i might consider xna.