Hello All, We are gonna start developing for the xbox 360 using the xbox dev kit (not xna). I would like to know if you guys have any suggestion of what would be the ideal PC workstation (processor, graphics card, hardware, etc) to do this work. I imagine it would be nice to have a multicore processor, a graphics card that is similar to that of the xbox 360, and a server. I am curious to know if people out there are using compile farms to speed up builds, etc. I would like to know if you guys have a point of view on this. Thanks, William

Anything that will run the C# dev environment is fine. When XNA comes out of beta, you will be able to debug the code on the 360 itself.

Quote:Original post by taby
Anything that will run the C# dev environment is fine. When XNA comes out of beta, you will be able to debug the code on the 360 itself.

Did you even read his post? The first line!

You'd imagine correct. Its best to have a multicore CPU and an ATI graphics card that supports shader 2.0

Quote:Original post by dave_

Quote:Original post by taby
Anything that will run the C# dev environment is fine. When XNA comes out of beta, you will be able to debug the code on the 360 itself.

Did you even read his post? The first line!

lol

For Condemned, our dev systems were:

Single core, 3.0 GHz
Radeon 9800
1 or 2 gigs of memory

Most of the hardware requirements came from the need to run various tools. For example, creating high detail models in Maya and ZBrush can require some decent hardware. Similarly, on very large projects, link time can be a monster. More memory can help with this.

In the end, if your game runs on the config above, you won't have many problems on the 360. If you want a PC that is similar in performance to the 360, and if you plan to leverage all of the cores, yes, a dual/quad proc machine may be a better alternative. When you get to that point however, you really want to be running on the dev kit itself.

Thank you guys for the replies.

BrianL, I checked out the Condemned web site and it looks quite impressive. I am curious to know if you guys have your own engine or if you use a commercial one. I would also like to know if you had trouble with the build time of the game. I am thinking of using a server to run automated builds, unit tests, and perhaps to help with distributed builds too. I would be glad to know your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
William

[Edited by - mallouk on October 9, 2006 7:46:40 PM]

Monolith uses its own internally developed engine. Condemned started with the engine we built for Fear and moved it forward from there. Touchdown Entertainment (formerly known as Lithtech) sells Monoliths engine.

When you talk about build times, do you mean code or assets? We use Incredibuild for distributed code compiling, as we have a few million lines of it between our game, engine and content authoring tools. Compiling everything from scratch, which isn't a common action, takes about 45 minutes. Incremental game runtime compilation generally took less than 2 minutes.

Full asset rebuilds, by the end of the project, took around 6 hours. This involved repacking all assets in the game for multiple platforms. Incremental builds, to catch changes every two hours, averaged about 15 minutes. All builds were done by a dedicated build machine which checked the packed assets into source control.

If you have a large number of assets or are going to support multiple platforms, I would highly suggest a dedicated build machine.