Microsof has claimed to publish XNA with Windows Vista:
http://www.microsoft.com/xna/
As i have understood, The Microsoft XNA will produce the source codes for programmers. Programmers don’t need to write many codes and it write codes for them based on the charts specified by programmers. It’s a good news, However Microsoft will not use from OpenGL in XNA. So isn’t XNA menace OpenGL?
-Ehsan-
Yes it is, unfortunately, as all 3D things from Microsoft (and I only speak about 3D…). Microsoft does not want to use GL anymore: GL is a competitor for Microsoft, not only against D3D, but also against all Microsoft products.
Anyway, this is only a commercial trick for DirectX programmers I guess. And as all tools I wonder how far this gives intended results. I’m pretty sure it will be a big headache for those who’ll try it.
When you use an engine from an existing game, there are also few code to write, most of them are inside the engine.
Why doesn’t somebody just simply write a plugin for Visual Studio that does the same thing with OpenGL that XNA does with DirectX? That would solve the problem immediately.
As i have understood, The Microsoft XNA will produce the source codes for programmers.
Not exactly. XNA is meant to help manage very large, complex and costly tool/asset pipelines in big game productions.
Why doesn’t somebody just simply write a plugin for Visual Studio that does the same thing with OpenGL that XNA does with DirectX?
Well, for one thing it’s not a simple matter to create a robust tool/asset framework. Secondly, there’s really been no push for this in the PC market. The PS3, by comparison, has quite a nice asset pipeline, as I understand it.
This kind of thing is well beyond the purview of a stand-alone graphics API. The community could produce something like this, if it were so inclined.
You should investigate Collada, it’s Sony’s answer to XNA (or part of it), it’s open, cross platform and of course can be rendered using OpenGL.
https://collada.org/public_forum/welcome.php
https://collada.org/public_forum/
Don’t get caught up in the Hype. Microsoft has a long history of over-hyping stuff. A good toolchain for asset creation and management has been a key part of 3D game development for years now, but it’s also a burden for small developers. So is asset/content creation. There’s no easy solution but with an open standard like Collada hopefully you’ll be able to get data from 3D Studio MAX and Maya etc. into a digestible format easier and if you support Collada you may be well on your way to breaking the back of the asset pipeline issues for very little investment compared to the way this is normally done (custom exporters and/or expensive middleware). Eventually we’ll see plugins and tools like Milkshape being able to work with Collada data and do really interesting things. Maybe there will be an open source project or two or a demo/tutorial to show how to load, manipulate and render a Collada model for OpenGL.