New development platform unites Windows, Xbox and Windows Mobile devices, aims to accelerate game development through shared tools.
Microsoft today announced XNA, a next-generation software development platform. XNA empowers developers to deliver games while combating rising production costs and ever-increasing hardware complexity. Games for future iterations of all Microsoft game platforms - including Windows, Xbox and Windows Mobile-based devices - will be created by tools and technologies from the XNA development platform.
XNA aims to form a common environment to reduce the time spent in development of generic code. The industrywide XNA initiative will be unveiled today in a keynote speech delivered by Microsoft's Robbie Bach, senior vice president of the Home and Entertainment Division, and J Allard, corporate vice president, Xbox platform, and chief XNA architect, to hundreds of game developers at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. In the speech, Bach will outline some of the challenges that game developers will face in the near future.
Xbox Live development tools for functionality such as billing, security, login, friends and matchmaking will be made available to Windows developers. The tools should make it easier to create the same social, unified online gaming experiences on Windows as on Xbox.
On the input front, as part of XNA, Microsoft will develop a common controller reference design and unify input APIs and button standards across multiple platforms. The result will be a family of common controllers for Windows and Xbox game players.
In graphics and audio, many tools such as PIX (an analysis tool) and XACT (an audio authoring tool) - previously available only to Xbox developers - now will be available on Windows as part of the XNA development platform. Likewise, innovations from Windows such as High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) will come to Xbox. The DirectX API and the Visual Studio development system will continue to be the baseline environment for both platforms. Collectively, these tools and technologies will enable movie-quality graphics while forming the impetus for new software that will help developers cope with the looming complexity of high-definition video and audio.
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