XNA, MC2 and the PS3

After landing in San Jose this afternoon, I rushed over to the Convention Center where GDC is being held. Thankfully, my hotel (the Marriott) is connected to the center, so after a 45-second walk I was in the Microsoft booth. While the booth was still under construction (the show floor opens tomorrow) I was able to meet with the guys who are working on XNA. They showed me some cool demos, like one called ?~Culture’ that was build in less then three weeks with the XNA tools. Not only that, but the XNA tools also enable quick cross platform porting. They showed this off by showing me ?~Culture’ on both the Xbox and Windows…driven from the same base code! You can see pictures of the demo on my flickr site. They are actually giving away a Community Preview (I guess that’s the new Microsoft buzz word for beta) of the tools that include the full source code for MechCommander 2. What better way way to show how a tool works then by sharing actual game code you can load in and play around with. The best part? You don’t even need to be here to grab the bits: You can actually download the tool here then go grab the MechCommander 2 shared source code here to see how it all works. (There, I just saved you a trip to San Jose to get the DVD 🙂 )

Tomorrow morning is the ‘Bloggers Breakfast’ with Peter Moore and Chris Satchell. I have a quick interview set up with Chris, so I’ll get more details about XNA from him for this weeks show.

When I was leaving the Microsoft booth, I took a quick detour by the Sony booth and grabbed this shot of the PS3 dev kit on display (behind plastic with the orange and green lights.) I could not help but notice, but doen’t it look like the devkit is running Windows XP? I could not get close enough to see the debug spew coming out on to the screen, but it made me chuckle. The good news is they have hardware on display so anyone that is here at GDC can drop by and see some of their tech demos and the hardware. (note: no sign of the boomerang in sight)