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XNA Magic

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tinjaw:
There is a new kid on the block- XNA Magic. It looks like it is the first game engine built from the ground up for Microsoft's XNA technology. I have requested to be part of the beta. I'll report in if I get in.

From their website:
XNA Magic is the first all-in-one game development system designed from the ground up to take full advantage of the brand new Microsoft XNA platform.

Providing an extensible game engine, level editor, particle system design surface, logic editor, script editor and a great deal more, XNA Magic is designed to be both complete and easy to use.

As well as the core engine that is designed to work on both Windows® XP and the XBox 360, XNA Magic features a fully dynamic design time environment that allows you to see changes to all your game components, shaders and assets in real time.

XNA Magic is not a port of an existing engine, it is a complete solution designed around the brand new XNA Framework. It is therefore completely shader based throughout and has no ties to a fixed function past.

What’s more, unlike many engines that require you to modify the engine source, XNA Magic takes a highly granular approach. You can choose to dip in and use whatever aspects you need and no more. Scenes you create in the development environment can be run standalone or exported as a components that you can call from your own code.
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Deozaan:
This looks cool! Keep us up to date.

Ruffnekk:
Yup I also signed up for Beta testing earlier  :Thmbsup:  Hope I get through!

scriptedfun:
Looks amazing! I think that this is a great idea - building an engine that's free from legacy code, or at least built with such an intention in mind. :) My concern though is that the games won't be able to run on a Mac. Most probably, they'll work on XBox 360 though, and this is another tool that smaller game development houses (or individuals! :) ) can use to get that big break :).

This looks very similar to OTEE's Unity, a fantastic-looking Mac game development tool (which unfortunately I haven't had the chance to use yet :( ). Despite being a Mac-only development tool, Unity is able to produce games for both Windows and Mac.

tinjaw:
Unfortunately it is a mater of economics. There is very little money to be made selling Mac or Linux games. Now, that isn't, in and of itself, a reason to make your game engine Windows only. But, if there are features that you can add to make the game engine better that would require different codebases for different platforms, then you only do it for Windows because you probably can't get your money back on the Mac or Linux codebase. Cross-platform engines are nice, but they often result in less than optimal performance on every one of those platforms. So, open source will probably be the primary source of cross-platform game engines for the foreseeable future.

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