There is nothing stopping you from making a AAA game in XNA. In fact, Microsoft would probably love you for doing so :). But the framework itself is powerful and considering how powerful the Xbox 360 is (and that XNA has access to 4 of the 6 hardware threads), I don't see why XNA on an Xbox 360 couldn't get at least to the quality of Halo on Xbox. Seems quite possible.

I think, if you have the resources, you could build a pretty decent game with XNA. I haven't used XNA myself, but I know that large game studios tend to want to have control of nearly anything that happens on the system (memory allocations, cache misses etc.), especially on console. Therefore I would actually think XNA would be too high-level for any studio that makes AAA-games.

P.S. 1+1=10, of course, not 11. [wink]

As far as I know you can't use Managed C++ with XNA and make games for the XBox 360. I am fairly sure that you can only use C# currently.

I don't see why you couldn't make an AAA game with XNA but to do so would require the appropriate budget and team. With such a budget it might be better to purchase the XBox 360 dev kit currently as XNA can't be used for commercial XBox 360 games (yet).

fwiw halo was written in c not c++

Quote:There is nothing stopping you from making a AAA game in XNA. In fact, Microsoft would probably love you for doing so :)

would they? would they make money off it, if not then the answer is no

Quote:Original post by zedz
fwiw halo was written in c not c++

I never heard that before, not that I don't believe you. Just seems weird that they'd go with C over C++.

Quote:

Quote:There is nothing stopping you from making a AAA game in XNA. In fact, Microsoft would probably love you for doing so :)

would they? would they make money off it, if not then the answer is no

Microsoft is trying to push XNA and managed code both for gaming and Windows. It's part of their "Games For Windows" campaign where the games all share commonalities (like using the Xbox 360 controller). When the first XNA built Xbox Live Arcade game was announced, it made decent news to Microsoft. They showed it off as "what XNA could do." Now take that response and multiply it by the difference between an arcade game and a AAA game. That's why they'd be happy. It'd convince more people to use XNA.

And yes, commercial Xbox 360 projects will require XNA Professional (or whatever they wind up calling it) which will sell for a currently undisclosed price. So technically this would make Microsoft money. However, you can develop and market PC games just as you would making them in C++ using DirectX or OpenGL.

I also believe that the professional version has been rumored to support Managed C++ as well as C# so as to reduce some of the learning curve of using managed code. I've also read about the eventual inclusion of most languages into XNA at one point or another. I've seen things (little hackery, but not necessarily against any EULAs that I'm aware of) such as using Visual BASIC with XNA so it's possible. It's just a regular managed library as far as I know. It's that the IDE (Game Studio Express) only uses C# for a language as it's based on Visual C# Express.

Plus to play the games you need to pay Microsoft $100 a year for Live Arcade... More XNA games=more reason to get Live Arcade which gets Microsoft more money.