DanielMD wrote:



OK a couple of things:

1) The videos are really cool, and i really like the fact that Microsoft is "getting it" wend it comes to creating a game community.

2) You guys don't know the indie market that well, what XNA studio is doing has been done dozens of times (gamemaker, unity, etc... http://www.dpfiles.com/dpfileswiki/index.php?title=PAID_3D_GAME_ENGINES . The main problem is not the pipeline, or getting assets into the game, the problem comes down to stuff like doing UI programming for the game, adding scripting ability, getting all the parts working together, the physics, the network code, etc... that is the hard part where I and all Indies need help.

XNA "as is" is just Microsoft twist to the game development problem unfortunately no magic solutions for the indies, and actually not an evolution for people that are already using better tools (except for the xbox link, but that is so crippled right now, that it makes no sense for the indie developer just the hobbyst).

Bottom line, very interesting stuff, promising stuff to look forward too, but as always Microsoft fails to deliver the gold, they deliver silver that is nice, but it's not going to solve the problems of the indie developers. Still i am definetly keeping an eye on it

mwirth wrote:

well.. i need to express my thoughts on this one.
i don't mean to be rude and i certainly do not want to criticize or even offend any person working on the project. but to me celebrating the (partial) css compliance of the browser is like anouncing that the new product won't be as problematic as much as the last version. now again, i 'm certainly not saying that i think IE 7 is not an important and much improved release that's going to be one of the main browsers out there. but the "hype" around getting it right is something i don't like. i always feel that 's like being happy about stuff that should work correct in the first place. that's something a user takes for granted. it's not a feature, it's the basic foundation on which stuff may be built. i wouldn't brag with saying i got something right "this time".
i know that in a company the release schedule and time/money/personell constraints are in conflict with getting stuff right the first time. that's the way it works in reality. it's just that in theory this doesn't justify incomplete implementations or implementations that are known to be suboptimal. "we'll get there". yes, but in what version, one might ask rethorically.
somehow the c++ team is a bit on the same path (or at least has been). Yes we screwed up a lot last time with managed extensions for c++. but look at the product now! well... it should have been that way in the first place. yes, failures happen (to put it politely). it's way better than never getting it right. just don't celebrate it like a break through.

again, no offence to any of the people involved with the products mentioned above. i do use IE on a regular basis (and vc++ a lot), so i'm not all about microsoft bashing at all. i was just expressing my views on new features that are to me - in a way - essentially a bug fix. even if the bug is so gigantic that people got very accustomed to it and some even liked it.

cheers,
martin.

sparky wrote:

PatriotB wrote: With the DOJ settlement, a number of new shell interfaces and functions were "documented."  But this documentation is essentially useless: it basically amounts to function signatures, and leaves any idea of how to use it up to the developers' imaginations.

Function signatures and/or interface definitions would have been immensely helpful. Looking over my notes on shell extensions, I see that some of the interfaces that were undocumented at the time (around 2001) are now documented. But the interface "abcb3a00-1b2b-11cf-a49f-444553540000" still isn't documented at all. It has something to do with IShellFolder and/or IPersistFolder.

The DirectShow stuff I've done recently uncovered an interface "94bc0598-c3d2-11d3-bedf-00c04f612986" that is only mentioned on the web in a post where someone else ran into it previously. There is no documentation of any kind.

Manip wrote:

Zeo wrote: Manip wrote: I would expect to see grades go down... I really would like to hear the advantages over paper and pen? ... One big plus is spell check on the ink you write, that was a killer feature that helped me when I took tests with my tablet and made my essays more readable for my profs...which I'd argue made their lives easier and helped me get better grades.

It might have been a long time since you were at University but today they don't accept hand written essays at all and you aren't expected to write them in class either.

Some exams are computerised, some aren't... But either way that isn't graded as long as they can understand what your trying to say.