External Tools
As we've heard Microsoft have been in touch with garage games to get torque on XNA.
Have they been in touch with any other devs or will they be developing other in house tools for game creation ?
Maybe they should speak to the Unity guys who are making great indi game tools for the Mac.
http://unity3d.com/unity/index.html
Unity for Windows on Xna would be awsome.
[374 byte] By [
ChaosUK] at [2008-3-1]
I am not sure if I am the only one that is not into external tools that much. I like to make my own engine and tools to get content into my games. I did like UnrealEd because that gave you alot of controll. But this TourqeX does not excite me.
That being said I dont have any problems with tools being made so games are easy to build, I may make some my self.
The XNA Content Pipeline is designed to handle input data from many different tools.
Out of the box, we are shipping mesh importers for .X and .FBX formats.
That already covers a lot of different tools, because there are good
FBX exporters for Max, Maya, XSI, Milkshape, and many others.
But more importantly, this is an extensible mechanism. It's pretty easy
to write importers for new file formats, or the other way around to add
processors and new output types for data that comes from the existing
formats. So you can integrate pretty much any kind of data from any
tool, while still keeping the benefits of our runtime ContentManager,
and using out build system that integrates game content into Visual Studio.
Thanks for the info, I'm still a little stuck though. None of the plugins from that link support XSI. The SDK seems interesting but don't have time for it. I installed the converter and it seems like it would be usefull but XSI does not export any of the formats that the converter inputs. .Obj maybe but the export .obj option in XSI is greyed out. Don't get me wrong thanks for the info but I don't see a way to use the XSI game mod tool with XNA and from what I see on the forums no one else has tried it.
Yes thanks for the link but I've already installed XSI 4.2 and the mod add-ons and even created some models, however I've scoured their site for any info on using it with XNA, specifically with regard to exporting to a .x or .fbx file but there is nothing at all. I've heard a few grumbles in the forums about the same problem I'm having. I don't want to sound like I'm a trouble maker :) but I don't understand why softimage is considered a "Partner" to XNA when all microsoft has done is put the link to an existing product (XSI) on their site. If you can point me to some specific information on how XSI can be used to create XNA content then I will certainly eat a large portion of crow :)
