3 Responses to “In which Mattie links a discussion on the .NET CLR on XBox 360”

1. jorend Says:
   March 20th, 2006 at 2:04 pm

   You're the one with the game coding experience. Is it your impression that games need C++ speed, even at the cost of being written in C++?

   I kind of had the impression that there's rather a lot of high-level code in the average game that could just as well be written in C#... and rather a lot of low-level code that can't.

2. Mattie Says:
   March 20th, 2006 at 4:08 pm

   Well, I actually didn't think too hard about it from the technical level. A lot of games really don't need to be low-level anyway. The visually amazing ones do, but a puzzle game, "cute" RPG, or networked stategy game won't care much at all if they aren't running at break-neck graphics. That'll be a challenge for MS to get it as tight as they can, but they've been working on this for so long with DirectX that I wouldn't be surprised if they can get it passable. As you mentioned, there's a lot in games nowadays that don't need to be so low-level anyway (menuing, config management, sound coordination, playing static movies, etc).

   For some reason my mind jumped straight to the business implications of this. Microsoft now has their biggest development initiative embedded in their game console. Game platforms have been locking people into their development tools for a long time, but it's a little different when that platform is already competitive in other spaces. CLR on XBox? Well, why can't Sun get embedded? (Or even get installed after the fact?) It's a weird game on the consoles.

   This just increases the overall mindshare for .NET and further increases the likelihood that PC game developers will develop for XBox. It's really a leverage thing and a great plan for MS in the console war. I'm not sure it's good for anyone else, though (other than coders).

3. jorend Says:
   March 23rd, 2006 at 6:24 pm

   Oh. Well, I don't know anything about the business of game development.

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