I know been a long time but have been very busy with university work and enjoying playing arround with OpenGL and such. But went to this event today and just thought id post up a few comments :)

XNA Launch Event
After attening the seven different sections of the day i was very impressed with what they displayed of XNA, the shear power for rapid development of game ideas was amaizing. In a few minutes a demonstrate was able to create a 3d scene, okey it may not of been astonishing graphics but they were pretty impressive. But also astounding considering the amount of code he wrote, i think it was 10-20 lines to have a scenery and a little tank okey didn't do much but 10-20 lines of code usually your just working on getting the window to display.

Sadly i didn't take many photos i was to busy listening to the presentation.

Just thinking about what is possible with XNA amaizes me and how quickly ideas are able to be turned in to a reality it is great. Not only this for Windows but also works with Xbox360 and is easily deployable through VS2005 C# sadly only express but im sure that will be fixxed soon.

If that doesnt blow your mind then start thinking community having students and hobbyists or even teams of students working together improving on other peoples components build new ones and then send a final release onto the Xbox community its just one of the things that they are aiming for with XNA, granted they arn't there yet but the protential is there and it wont be in the too distant future before the methods are in place.

XNA and the market - my take
Although im not so sure that top end games will be completely written in C# and XNA but what i think is more than likely is prototyping games using it. Think of a company being able to rapidly turn an idea into a prototype and then see wether they think that the game is commercially viable it wont be amaizing the graphics wont be astounding but i think this will take away from the idea of graphics making a game. If the idea is developed first and a simple version of the game is worked on and improved quickly a good enjoyable game will result. This also works with people able to start building a game and then show people clearly what there idea is so that it can be improved apon if liked.

If you havent guessed im rather taken with XNA, im going to enjoy fiddling with it other christmas and i hope alot of others will too.

p.s. Rob miles of the Univesity of Hull got the most laughs :)