Game Development Tools Previewed

Two years after announcing XNA, a planned unified development platform for Xbox and PC games, Microsoft unveiled several components of the platform at the Mar. 2006 Game Developers’ Conference (GDC). The goal of the platform is to lower the cost of game development, which can often run more than US$10 million for a graphics-intensive Xbox game, by giving developers tools like those available to Windows developers, and to make it easier to port games across platforms, helping game publishers recoup costs more quickly. However, XNA is still a work in progress, and timelines for major deliverables have not yet been announced.

At the 2006 GDC, Microsoft announced a tool to help game development teams build their code, .NET libraries for game development, and third-party access to the Xbox Live platform.

XNA Build, released as a community technical preview, is the first available component of the planned XNA Studio development environment. XNA Studio will be based on Visual Studio Team System and will help large teams with multiple roles, such as coders and graphic designers, better collaborate on game development. XNA Build provides a set of tools to help development studios orchestrate game builds, a process that involves translating the game’s source code, as well as graphics, audio, and video files, into a form that can run on a console. Today, for example, it is common for game producers to use a variety of home-grown scripts and tools to create their specific game components, with developers using one set and graphic artists a different set. This can make it difficult to track dependencies among these components and to debug early builds of the game. XNA Build provides a single build technology based on Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, as well as a way to track relationships and dependencies among components.