While, like Unity Wii, this doesn’t really affect me personally (I own a small development team which doesn’t qualify for the XDK), I still think this is excellent news.
One more pipeline to a major console is always great, and knowing that you can possibly port your game to the big players in the future without major rewrites puts a smile on my face.
It also means more major companies might use Unity and that support will eventually trickle down to us, like what happened with FusionFall.
I would imagine that it’s still quite a few months away, but it’s awesome nonetheless.
The features that will be added in to make it competitive on the next gen platforms will be features that are available to us also. Even if the platform itself isn’t.
That is really interesting, cause Unity can compete with XNA. And we will be able to put our games on the XboxLive market. It is just more opportunity.
Getting into XBLA Indie channels is an XNA thing, getting into XBLA itself requires a devkit. As the previous poster said, that puts it still outside the reach of most people on this forum.
That’s not a bad thing though, because it also means the small potatoes will benefit from larger studios placing expectations on Unity and those features making their way into the larger audience.
XBOX360 development will still be WAY out of reach for the vast majority of developers that consider themselves Indie. The costs associated with it are just too great.
But the fact that they are targeting that platform indicates that they must have some really big things planned for the engine itself. Whatever awesome improvements they make because they are targeting a next gen platform will trickle down to us.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that the big brains at Unity Tech are working on a solution much like the iPhone solution.
Exporting your project into a format that will open up XNA and load everything necessary and generate all appropriate and needed code to build the project through XNA and thus open up XBLA through indie channels.
This is not possible, Unity is written in C++ not C#.
This means, that you need a devkit.
Keep in mind that XBLA have nothing to do with XNA. XBLA is a distribution channel thus XNA is dev platform C# fueled.
Just because you aren’t capable of getting approved for 360 development, doesn’t mean you can’t sell your game/license/publish it through someone who can
Not really.
If you are a licensed XBox developer, which you must be to even license it, then such fees are really your smallest problem.
Development costs for XBLA games are in the range of $80’000 - $200’000 due to the requirements you have to meet and the QA you have to pass before you can release anything at all. Also, you need to be an established company with some track in the field otherwise you won’t get chance for a license at all then you need to work together with a publisher that has one.
Actually unity raises the chance that you get your hand onto a dev kit as you can present them a working project in the technology that will be used at the end, making it far easier to get some basic funding as they can experience the final result upfront.
And XNA is nothing else than the kiddie platform for the home hacker community, called “Indie Marketplace” by Microsoft (which it definitely isn’t, especially its not available to most places on earth, only a handfull of countries can access it at all). Its impossible to realistically fund Indie projects with the prices that are allowed on that store and the clearly missing exposure and selling user base.
I would like to add :
When you work on a digital distribution title ( XBLA, WiiWare or PSN ) you have more than one step toget your game to the online store.
After being approved as a licensed developer, each of your projects will have to be approved on different stages of the dev, which means two or tree more approvals.
So, being a licensed dev doesn’t mean that each of your games will be automatically accepted. Is something like a (per project) three step approval process.
If your thinking is correct, that because Unity is written in C++ not C#, so export → open XNA and set up project correctly → deploy/build to final target, isn’t possible, than how did they get the iPhone working? That is the path to the iPhone, just substitute XCode for XNA.
The platform/code choice of the underlying software isn’t the issue at all.
XCode also supports C++ in addition to Objective-C.
XNA does not.
Addendum:
If it’s a matter of ‘can’ they, I’m sure they can find a way. However it will take much more effort than other ports, and the target market, XNA users who will actually shell out for Pro, is not going to pay for the time it takes for them to do it.
How is the fact that Unity is written in C++ have any bearing on anything? The way the post is written, we are not talking about the code your game is written in, we are talking about what the Unity Engine is written in.
At the end of the day the result is a compiled binary that is in the format expected by the deployment target. How you get there is not an issue. You can code in whatever you want as long as you have a compiler that spits out an executable in the right format.
Take Unity for example, you can code your game in three different languages, and mix and match them in the same project, and compile for multiple platforms from one project.
…unless the engineers I have worked with over the last many jobs/years have been keeping something from me.
The question is if anyone would buy 5 it at figure prices for an Indie market only technology which is what XNA is for.
(the amount of users actually using the hobbiest store at all and the simple fact that the xbox hobbiest marketplace is not available in most countries mean that the potential market to sell your game to is just as restricted as the android, but that the code is completely incompatible to any other unity deploy target, requiring another rewrite)
XNA isn’t really of much interest outside the hobbiests market place.
Also, Unity entering the X360 market means entering the professional market, not the home hacker erm “indie” market, so the requirements for the disk deploy define the path and thats XDK and C++
Also you are actually wrong.
If the technology is written in C++ it will not import into XNA based project in any way at all.
It would have to be XNA all the way.
If XNA is really what you want, then I would recommend you to go with TorqueX as one of the last remaining XNA targeted technologies.
Hell I am tired of browsing for a World / Terrain / Level editor that works the way I do. I liked FreeWorld3D but it kept crashing. And Torque is dog slow, with its own interface issues (and yes, it crashed too). I enjoyed Unity’s Island demo, which worked flawlessly. I still find the interface a little clumsy, but if I can get to the same level as the demo, then I will be happy.
My goal is to get my projects into XNA Game Studio. I saw a script posted that will dump the objects to FBX, which I can use in XNA GS. Of course the trick is for me to have granular control over all the objects.
Basically, I will write the engine in XNA GS C#, and if all goes well, I will release it back to the community. It would be nice though if I could get concise documentation on the data structures. COLLADA?
I plan to support all the KOOL features that I saw in the demo, plus some that Torque implemented, and some that I need.
BTW – it’s not that I like C#, but it is a way into console development. I prefer C, C++, and when possible Assembly.
