Game Connect AP & XNA

Last year I attended the Game Connect Asia Pacific conference in Melbourne.

I found it very informative, and got more out of the relatively small (in a global sense) conference than expected. Tom from Tantalus kicked it off, detailing the GDAA’s efforts to extend the “screen” tax breaks currently applied to film, to games. This was followed by a typically ‘as low level as it gets’ PS3 talk, a free lunch (ok, included lunch), and a rather more interesting talk by Peter Isensee about Multi-core programming, including some easy ways to make a game multi-threaded (starting with separating update and draw into separate threads, and continuing with thread job-pools, Double-buffering update/draw and even a sub-frame buffer pipeline for enhanced responsiveness at the cost of programming flexibility). Asserting on non-ownership of objects in setters I thought was another good tip.

Peter is Director XNA Development Connection and was a good speaker. He plugged an XNA Event that was to be held just down the road in Microsoft’s southbank meeting office. Being very interested in XNA, as a hobby game platform, learning tool and commercial prototyping tool, I attended. It was a fun night, we heard more from Pete, and Nic from the Sydney office, and Glenn Wilson, an MVP. There was a good turn out, probably 20 or so, ranging from hobbiest who had not yet used XNA, to those that had, to people in the industry. The pizza was good too :) All in all a fun night, and I’m looking forward to continue playing with XNA.

Astute readers may have noticed a rather pro-Microsoft tone in the previous paragraph. I may as well admit that I’m a bit of a convert. It is hard to deny what they are doing with the 360 – not only is it a good, easy to develop platform, but their representives and support is excellent too. The fact that they allow *anyone* (for a small fee) to make games that run on the 360 (with a few limitations), is amazing. This is very very unusual for game hardware vendors. Companies such as Sony and Nintendo, and most that had gone before try very hard to keep out unlicensed developers. Granted, you can’t actually sell an XNA title for the 360 – but you can make them and play them, and pitch them. It is a winning strategy for MS too – by XNA being used by many universities, there will be a lot of young people who have X360 experience, further lowering development costs for that platform.

Had a good chat to the IBM guys, who were there spruking the Rational suite. Managed to get a good swag – 2 free t-shirts (one for our QA lead), a nice pen, a sweat band, and a table top arcade gaming machine (which I won)!!

All up it was a great two days, and winning the IBM raffle capped it off.