XNA 2.0 coming soon...

[savage]

XNA 2.0 will be out this holiday season apparently and Microsoft are holding a n XNA GameFest Conference (http://www.xnagamefest.com/talk_abstracts.htm) to get developers up to speed with what new features it will have. The main addition seems to be support for networked games.

Have a look at the topics (http://www.xnagamefest.com/talk_abstracts.htm) they will be covering. All looks very interesting. Remember if things don't change drastically in XNA 2.0 you will still be able to use Chrome to deploy on both Windows and Xbox 360!

[WILL]

Ahem... MMO fans. ;)

[savage]

Some good news on the XNA side. XNA 2.0 will work inside Visual Studio 2005. XNA 2.0 is due out in the autumn, which probably means a Christmas or New Years present.

So the current manual tweaking of .chrome files should be a thing of the past when that is released. Hopefully it is a smooth as that.

The new networking will automagically hook into Windows Live and Xbox Live and will allow Windows and Xbox users to play each other. Also in XNA 2.0 I read somewhere that they would allow using the WiiMote.

The more I use XNA the more I see this as a great way to make games.
The only downside is that it doesn't work on the Wii and PS3 yet.

Maybe Nintendo's Wiiware tools will prove interesting when they are released.

What Nintendo and Sony should do is join forces and embed Mono into their consoles. Then they could help with the Mono.XNA port and then it's a win, win situation for all game developers both aspiring and professionals who just want to proto-type something quickly. And now with the upcoming 2.0 release there will be no reason what so ever to switch to C#, unless they hard code in the fact that the XNA assemblies are only allowed to talk to C# code. It is possible to do, but that would not be a good move on Microsoft's part.