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Managed DirectX 2.0, Xna and Me...

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One of the Program Managers for the Xna Framework recently started his first blog.  Unless you have the main RSS feed of this site subscribed, you probably didn't notice his first post, which talks about a lot.

You may have also seen the 'official' press release announcing the Xna Framework.

If you haven't read Al's post yet, I suggest you go do that first.  It's ok, i'll wait for you to get done..

(Yup, i'm still waiting)

(You haven't forgotten about me have you?)

Great, you're back!  Anyway, there's so much stuff I want to talk about and say, but I'm probably going to start rambling and forget mentioning things..  C'est la vie.. 

So anyways, like I mentioned last week, I've moved over to the XBox team and the Xna team specifically.  If you're @ GDC this week, you might have the chance to see some of the demos we have written entirely in managed code running on both Windows as well as the XBox 360.  People have been asking me for what seems like forever if there would be managed support for the Xbox, and I guess we've finally answered that.

Of course, i've also had people tell me numerous times over the last 3 to 4 years that it is essentially impossible to write a game in managed code.  I have no idea why people think that, but obviously we disagree, and our demo's are starting to show that (even considering the early nature of the work we've done).

So what about MDX2 though?  As I'm sure you're now aware (since you *did* go read Al's post), what is now called Managed DirectX 2 will be folded into the Xna Framework.  The assembly itself will still ship (in non-release 'beta' form) until we are ready to ship a pre-release version of the Xna Framework, but in it's current form, it will never be officially "released."

We're working feverishly to get a preview of the Xna Framework out as soon as possible, and I'm quite excited about the work we're doing, and the excitement people will have when they see it.  It's also quite refreshing to have an entire team supporting in these efforts.

I look forward to talking more about some of the exciting things we're doing in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    That's really exciting to hear someone like the XNA PM saying, "we need a CLR on the XBox". That is awesome, really exciting.

    Looking forward to the future! Will be interesting to see what XNA will do for the industry.

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    Hey Tom, I was wondering something. Has there been discussion as to whether the XNA Framework is going to be released as a free download like Managed DirectX or are we going to have to purchase XNA Studio? I would hate to see this move take hobbyist development back a step :).

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    PingBack from http://blog.3deurope.com/index.php/2006/03/20/xna-framework/

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    We were already speculating on this in David Weller's thread on GameDev, so this is just great, great news! :D

    The only damper on all of this joy could be that MDX2.0 might only be available through the non-free XNA studio... On the other hand, normal DirectX is also still a free download and I presume you can make enough money from XBox 360 dev kits, so I'll keep my hopes up that MDX2 remains freely available and maybe even an XNA Studio Express might come along.

    Some info on this would be much appreciated though :)

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2006
    Please finish/release/support MDX2 for .NET 2.0/XP/Vista prior to trimming it down (i.e., removing DirectSound, DirectInput/keyboard/mouse, some D3DX, etc.) for the XNA framework (which will likely take yet another 4-6 months).  You seem to be so close to wrapping it up.  It is time to get some "kinetic energy" out of MDX in addition to the "exponential potential".

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2006
    We haven't announced anything on distribution, release vehicles, pricing, or anything of that nature.  However, we do realize that MDX is currently a free download for the Windows platform.  I think the people currently using that won't have much to worry about after upgrading.

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2006
    .NET on XBOX 360 is the best thing we can dream! Now please, allow EVERYBODY to develop homebrew software for it.

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2006
    If MDX is moving to this new platform, will there be similar MDX releases for the compact framework, or is this the end of the road?

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    After playing around with MDX 1.1 for a while I've moved over to the MDX 2.0 beta and I'm finding it great. I'm just worried about your comments "what is now called Managed DirectX 2 will be folded into the Xna Framework" and Wikipedia's XNA entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_Framework) which kinda imply that MDX 2 is only gonna be available for Vista and the XBox 360.

    I'm presuming that the Wikipedia entry is just misleading me, but I use Windows 2003 for development and there are a lot of people out there that use XP and are gonna be for a long time. Is MDX2/XNA going to be available for those platforms, or is it just Vista/XBox 360?

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    We're not ignoring versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista I can assure you.

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Will XNA support WinForms (e.g., for tool development)?

  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
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    March 24, 2006
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    April 02, 2006
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    April 03, 2006
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    April 05, 2006
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    April 07, 2006
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    April 07, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2006
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  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2006
    Is MDX2.0 really that much faster than MDX1.1?

    Anyone have some numbers to share?

  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2006
    Aaron,

    We ported a 200K LOC engine written in C#/MDX 1.1 to MDX 2.0 and we observed a 1FPS performance increase with a dense scene.

    Shaun

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2006
    Wow, people are really on the ball when it comes to new DirectX SDK releases. Browsing Virtual Realm...

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