So, I've spent the better part of this last week (and this) doing some planning for what a community

The fact that these tools are not “pre-installed” would not stop anyone who really wants to make games. If you’re too afraid to download a free programming language, you don’t deserve to make games anyway.

If you want to make games today, there are just thousands of free choices: you can join a MOD crew, you can write GameBoy Color in ASM, you can write Direct3D in C++, etc. etc.

If there’s a problem, it’s that no matter what game you make, and no matter how good it is, chances are that you’ll **never** make any money at it, unless you become a very small cog at a very large company.

Bryan McNett

http://www.mcnett.org/

http://www.amazingpig.com/

The best resource I’ve found is ticalc.org.

The C64 was the first and last machine that I truly understood inside out … came close with the Nintendo 64, but a Windows PC? Forget it!! I like where the XNA initiative is going, pity it’s not free on Xbox360 too, and definitely needs a simple distribution model — perhaps a public corner of Xbox Live Arcade?

Keep up the good work on the website.

I also remember trying to learn C in the late 90′s; the selection of free tools available at that time was pale in comparison to tools available today. This is something that I think was a major barrier; it’s much less risky to spend a bit of time installing some free tools to experiment with than to have to buy a piece of software just to do some tinkering.

So I think the resources available today are much greater, but as you say, it’s much more complicated. Luckily, as you point out, there are languages such as python which are quite easy to start playing with, but do not come pre-installed . . . at least on a windows machine. Python, Perl, and gcc are pretty standard features of most Linux distros. Heck, users can even start with a bit of bash scripting if they have the bug to make the computer do their bidding

I think this is probably one of the major advantages that drew me to linux; the plethora of powerful tools that are easily available to me. Setting up similar tools on windows can be a nightmare in my experience.

I have suspected for a while that this has also had an adverse effect on the programmers coming into the industry. When I started, there was a culture of experimentation and exploration; you were encouraged to learn and understand, and things were accessible. Today, this seems to have shifted towards knowing how to use visual designers and what libraries to use / call.

However, I’ve increasingly noticed that when faced with something slightly more unusal or things that aren’t working as expected, they often simply don’t know how to even start trying to solve the problem; this is especially noticeable if they have to use a debugger, which many newcomers have often only used a few times before. I suspect that the lack of this history of experimentation, machine organisation, etc. discourages them from trying to find out and understand more about the machine, language, libraries, etc. they’re using and this puts them at a serious disadvantage in my view.

Although I like the sound of XNA, I’d really like C++ support as well; whilst I understand Microsoft want to push .Net, as far as I can tell C++ is still (by far) the dominant language within the games industry, and likely to remain that way for the near future (if not a lot longer).

If this was an MS clone of Virtools for PC/360 or an MS clone of the Unreal tools for PC/360 then maybe this would truely be revolutionary opening up the doors for more and more people, letting them get their feet wet in game development without having to know 100s of details of programming but as it is it sounds like the hype of being executable on 360 is actually overshadowing that it’s really not more than is already out there.

In fact MS’s own DirectX already ships with C# game examples or visa-versa.

As Noel mentioned, something like Dark Basic or possibly better yet Blitz Basic might have been better. It’s pretty clear they work well. Some where between Virtools and C#.

(PS: I love to come help you get it there

On the distribution front for the 360, I think we’re on the same page as well and we are very aware of this hole in our v1 product. To quote the person in charge of XNA GSE (from the team blog at blogs.msdn.com/xna):

“Because this is a blog and not the actual press announcement, I can talk about the big obvious hole in the plan. When we ship XNA Game Studio Express this fall, you will be able to share your final product with anyone on your windows machine that you want, but there is no support for sharing Xbox binaries other than sending your source around. We fully intend to fix this in the future, and if I have anything to do about it, it will be sooner than later. The more people that sign up for the subscription and start showing cool innovative content that everyone wants, the easier it will be to get this done.”

This project is a challenging and bold project and IMO we still have to prove internally and externally that it’s really worth the investment and there is something huge to be gained from it. I strongly believe this is the case and it’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve done in my career as a software engineer. I hope you’ll be happy with where we want to bring this project .

(The lawyers would kick me in unpleasant places if I didn’t say that : ‘The posting(s) on this site are provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. The opinions presented here are mine and mine only and do not represent the views of my employer, my management or my co-workers’.)

I miss the days where I could just boot up my 386, type in “tb” and start writing the next wolfenstein-killer (with zombies and plasma guns and stuff) right after “screen 9″. I never managed to put something convincing out of all this (apart from a job in the games industry), but I really had lots of fun playing with the machine.

Nowadays, when I sit in front of my msvc at home, I start collecting all the libraries I’ll need, then I setup them all, read a bit of doc to do it properly, write some framework code, fight with the linker… And by the time I can display “hello world” on the screen, I forgot my idea about my next doom3-killer (with zombies and plasma guns and stuff).