Looks like MS is slightly lowering the barrier to getting UWP-style games published.
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/xbox/xboxlive/creator
As usual, UWP is still partially crippled and I haven’t found any indications whether memory or processing allocations have improved. Probably not, given something as basic as multiplayer is still not supported. Microsoft marketing’s fetish for overcomplicating everything is apparently intact.
I might have to give this Creator’s program a try. I finished one of my recent Assets, and I was planning on using it soon to construct some basic board games. My Xbox One is just sitting on my desk collecting dust at the moment. It wouldn’t hurt to give this program a spin to see what kind of performance can be squeezed out of it.
Yeah, the resource limitations are still documented as they were early on in the preview, I don’t think they’ve changed.
I wonder if this is a move to provide separate developer support for different types of games? I’m pretty sure that originally you could use UWP to make a game but not to publish it - you had to go via ID@Xbox to do that. I’m sure the number of studios doing that for small games and/or mobile ports would have put a huge load on that, so it’d make a lot of sense to let the games that fit entirely within UWP’s capabilities to have their own support stream.
I think select publishers could publish UWP games to Xbox (ID@ afaik was for native xbox development using Unity, UE4, etc), but the content had to be approved by Microsoft and not just anyone could submit to do that.
And this is only developing through Windows 10 correct? I am not moving beyond 8.1 any time soon, so I’m wondering what alternatives are. Maybe partition the boot drive to install of Windows 10 just to do the builds? Could most likely do all of the development on my 8.1 machine and move the project over at intervals to test building.
I think that’s right.
Win10 actually isn’t too bad if you install StarDock’s Start10 so you get a normal desktop and Start menu instead of that Metro tablet garbage. I think it’s $8 or so.
(My other must-have utility is DisplayFusion Pro, a great utility for managing multiple displays, especially on a laptop that may be connected to different multi-display configurations in different places. Win10 improved multi-monitor support but not by much.)
No, you don’t need Windows 10 OS to develop or build for Windows 10. I believe the minspec is Windows 8.1. You only need the test machine to be running Windows 10 (in this case, probably Xbox One).
You can’t actually run it locally though, right? That’s what I was thinking about. Can you debug remotely against an Xbone?
Well that’s what I’m wondering. So I can hook the Xbox One up to my 8.1 machine and build and test directly from that onto the Xbox One?
Yeah, you cannot run the application on your local machine. But you can deploy to a remote windows 10 machine or an xbox one.
On this guidance doc page it’s saying that to deploy to Xbox One I would need a Windows 10 PC and the Windows 10 SDK. So I couldn’t develop games in Unity and deploy to an Xbox One with my Windows 8.1 machine? I’m sorry I’m kind of ignorant of this but am considering buying an Xbox One to deploy a current project to.
TBH I have no idea why they say Windows 10 is required :/. 1.5 years ago I hadn’t upgraded my main development machine to windows 10 yet as we were introducing UWP support for Unity, but I could deploy to both remote Windows 10 machines and HoloLens while building on Windows 8.1. Maybe something changed. I haven’t personally used Windows 8.1 in ages. As far as I know, it should work - unless newer versions of VS are pickier.
I believe you also need the Windows 10 SDK installed. As for actually deploying to the xbox itself you might have to have Windows 10, but not sure.
I know this may sound silly, but I wonder if you can install the Windows 10 SDK on Windows 8.1? So no simple answer as of this moment right? We aren’t sure if Unity 5.4 can build to an Xbox One from a Windows 8.1 machine?
You definitely can. Anyway, you can just install Unity, and try building to Windows Store and see if the build succeeds. Don’t forget to check if the generated VS project builds. If it says success, it means that building works. At that point, deploying should work too.
Cool I have the latest 5.4.xxx version installed currently with latest Visual Studio as well. I’d just need the Windows 10 SDK installed. I did read in Microsoft docs that you don’t even need a developer account to build to it, just a standard Windows account. I am in the ID@xbox program and am wondering if that is advantageous to this Creator program.
Apparently these titles will be stashed away in a separate area of the store. Sounds like XBLIG all over again.
So I am looking in the build settings at the Xbox One build target and it says “No Xbox One module loaded” Open Downloads Page. It takes me to this page: Unity Blog which has no downloads to be found and is only talking about the ID @ program. Where can I find the build module? I’ve already installed the Windows 10 SDK.
The Xbox One build target I think is for those using the XDK… native Xbox. You want to build for Windows 10 UWP.
The Xbox One target is for native Xbox One builds deployed via a dev kit. This thread is talking about UWP stuff, which isn’t specific to Xbox One (it’ll deploy to any UWP platform). It’s the Windows Store build target you’re looking for.