XNA Launch

A bit late posting this one I know - but in my defence, I didn't have a blog before! So anyway, last Wednesday, a few of us (Dean, Max, Terra, Yam & myself) went off to Warwick uni to see Microsoft's latest release - XNA. Actually, let me correct that - Max, Dean and Yam went to see XNA, Terra came along for the free stuff and I went there in the (admittedly unlikely) hope that Peter Molyneux would ask me to marry him.

We left nice and early, and got to the building in Warwick with minimal casualties (Terra sustained a minor head wound) - and the first thing I noticed was...there was a *massive* wall inside the building that appeared to be completely dedicated to Deep Purple. Now, anyone that has had the misfortune to mention Deep Purple to me will know that I can reel off the odd fact about them, but in addition to a plethora of album titles and members of the band I recognized on this wall, I'll admit there was the odd phrase or name that I couldn't quite place. I'm completely baffled as to precisely why Warwick opted to build this monument to the classic rock legends - but kudos to them all the same.

After breakfast and playing around on the 360 pods dotted around the room, Andy Sithers opened up the event with a brief overview - during which we found out that we'd all be getting $400 worth of XNA Creator's Club memberships, and that 5 of the 150 or so people at the event would be going home with a brand new XBox 360 and games. Seriously, you've got to love Microsoft events - so many freebies, I ended up with about 4 t-shirts and a very thick book on .NET.

Chris Satchel and Mitch Walker, who'd flown over from Seattle for the event were up next, and they gave us a really good insight into how XNA worked, and why it had been developed. The entire audience was completely hooked by the end of these two talks, which made the rest of the day (until the deity that is Peter Molyneux anyway) a bit redundant. From watching these two guys present and code, and seeing some of the demos everyone firmly believed that they could go home and write Mario, or at least Space Invaders within a couple of hours (it's actually a fair bit harder than that, but is honestly so much easier with XNA than coding direct through C+).

Next up was Nick Burton from Rare, and given that I've applied for a placement with those guys, I shouldn't badmouth him, but great speaker though he is, I think he went far too much into graphics considering the audience he had, and I'm sure most of us were pretty lost when he started getting excited about implementations of shader languages using XNA. Still though, he got his point across - you really can get extremely close to the machine using XNA, it doesn't take away any of the functionality of native code.

Had a kickass buffet lunch after this, and met up with some of the other MSPs who'd attended the event, chatted to them for a while - and then wandered over to find the MSP bosses - Stu Leddy and Matt Duffin. I brought my little group along too, to get me some brownie points for signing them up to the Imagine Cup, and managed to con them out of some cube t-shirts for us all.

Next up was Rob Miles, a lecturer, whose presentation on 'teaching with XNA' was pretty fun, but a bit redundant for the student percentage of the audience - a pity really, as the student percentage was well over 75 that day. And finally...Peter Molyneux. For those of you who didn't spend your childhood cooped up in a small dark room, with only your Amiga powerbox for heat and your TV for light - this is the man who founded Bullfrog Studios (Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park), and then sold it and founded Lionhead Studios (Black & White, Fable). He actually got Populous up on screen and told us the story of how it was coded, which was a real treat, and then gave a really high-quality overview of how XNA would allow creativity to flow much more freely in games now, and also a good few tips on how to get into the industry.

The event finished up with some more goodies being given away, before we flew off home. Lots of fun was had by all, and I'll be knocking something up in XNA when I'm done working on my Imagine Cup entries for you all to play with.

Xx