Wednesday, February 27, 2008

MEET ME AT THE SAVOY

Hi guys!

As you may know the pictures of each of the three winners of The Code Project's VS 2008 Compo (sponsored by Microsoft - Defy All Challenges) are being cyclically shown on the "Defy All Challenges" site.

I guess now it's my turn to appear on the site (finally!): http://www.visualstudio2008.defyallchallenges.com/.

Cheers!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

WHAT'S THE MEANING OF "XNA"?

Interesting question ... if you are taking a long brake with a cup of coffe or a beer on your hand as well as allowing your eyesight to go out the window into deep space (I mean both "windows", your computer's OS and your office/home's one).

A couple of days ago I watched "The Da Vinci Code" on DVD and some "late nights" ago -given that I was sleepless- a rerun of "2001: Space Odyssey" on Cable, so as you can guess I soon remembered the meaning behind "HAL" -the computer of the ship- that some guys used to argue. What is worse and sad, I suddenly started to look for patterns in almost everything: "23, 23, ...".

With the recent announcements that we can create games for Zune, and being mainly influenced by the first-mentioned film above, I started to think over the meaning of the word "XNA", if any.

I know it has been officially claimed that there is no real meaning behind the 3 letters, but WHAT IF those letters resulted from other 3 letters ... (?)

Following this crazy idea I played around a few minutes "shifting" the letters a couple of places back and forward and hereunder you will find what I got:

V W X Y Z
L M N O P
Y Z A B C

I don't have a clue what "VLY" and "YOB" could stand for, but let's take a look at the remaining two arrangements:

  1. WMZ : "Windows Mobile Zune", and my favorite
  2. ZPC : "Zune PC Console".
Now, which platforms will XNA be officially supporting on this mid-to-yearend 2008? ... wait ... processing ... wait ... got it! ... Yeap ... Windows (PC), XBox360 (Console) and Zune (errr ... Zune?) ... XNA sounds way better than WMZ and or ZPC.

Coincidence? Maybe ... :)

Watch this space!

[I know I have lost my mind but you still have a way out ... just avoid the combo of films: "The Da Vinci Code" and "2001". Don't worry, better posts are coming soon. I promise!]

Thursday, February 21, 2008

XNA GS 3: THE LUCKY NUMBER!

Being an old timer, it's incredible to see how fascinating the world of XNA is moving ahead. Since Managed DX first appeared, there also appeared the first steps of a big company to introduce C#, and managed code in general, into the game-development industry.

After all the uncertainty around the future of managed code in games when the doom of MDX 2 was unveiled -specially for all us who had embraced c# and MDX for our game projects, a new word started to being rumored with higher and higher strength: XNA.

Since the first beta of XNA GS was released, this baby has been growing up at a steady and solid pace. In fact, with this recent great announcement, MS has confirmed that is betting a hugh stake on the project and if you ask me, it's a winner bet. Other big companies are trying to copycat the idea, but they aren't moving that fast and that well, plus they're still attached to C++ ... and I love C#!

Being an indie, knowing that in a few months I'll have the possibility to sell my games for the XBox 360 as well as produce games for Zune is really exciting. It's very difficult and expensive to make a game project to reach the "going gold" phase, and MS way may prove to be an affordable means to show off our creations, get a contract with a publisher and why not, directly sell our games with an interesting profit, why not?

I don't know about you, but I was waiting to hear (or read) something like this all these years. Thumbs up for the XNA Team! Way to go ...

Cheers!