Coming Soon... Para el Colombiano mas Mexicano!
The new Xbox 360 Dashboard OS update is coming soon and it is going to be one of the biggest changes to the Xbox 360 since the system hit the market.
It is going to include the first complete redesign of the Xbox interface called the NXE by all the cool kids. The New Xbox Experience (NXE) is going to be the best thing to hit the Xbox and it is going to completely redefine how we use it.
One of the niftiest things at Penny Arcade Expo 08 was seeing the new Xbox dashboard. Xbox Live's own Major Nelson showed it off. He made sure to stress that it is still a work in progress and that there was an army of programmers over in Redmond that were cranking out code and testing it as he gave the demo.
As a side note if you ever go to a game expo or press event and Major Nelson asks you not to film something in the presentation and you do it anyway and then go on and keep on filming after he notices you and calls you out and you don't stop it then you are a total schmuck.
I've always thought that Microsoft's biggest advantage in their fight with Sony and Nintendo was software innovation. Let me tell you why:
New Interface
So far the new user interface design looks well designed, clean and very efficient. It sort of resembles Windows Media Center and the Zune OS. They really are putting in a lot of effort into trying to reduce the amount of clicks required to perform a task. It is much faster and looks like a totally new product. . I am glad that they are taking their time with it and is about as major as the change as the jump from the original Xbox to the 360.
They moved all the current functions from the current dashboard and moved it to the guide. That means you can pull up all the existing blades by hitting the big green Guide button on the controller. Information on a game from Xbox.com on the game in your disc tray or an Xbox Live Arcade game is loaded when the game is selected. They showed this off at PAX
At PAX I could not get an answer about if the new OS will be able to fast forward audio files to the middle of a long song or podcast or if it will be able to play a video from a playlist (that would help me sort out my video in iTunes or on my media server) but Major Nelson said that it was filed as feature request.
Overall I really liked the look at it.
Community XNA Games
I think while the new interface is getting all the press attention the feature with the most potenial to change the video game market is Community XNA games.
Towards the back of the PAX show floor there was a booth manned by some of the folks at Microsoft that have been working on the XNA community games. They had a PC with an RPG game opened up in Game Studio and an Xbox 360 with several community games running on it. I had a whole slew of pretty technical questions about the Community games program and got a lot of direct answers.
The concept was to have a program to encourage amateur video game developers on the Xbox 360. It has the potential to be a new market in video games between professionally funded games and shareware. XNA Community games developer can join the XNA developers club for the cost two new games a year and get access to some of the same software development tool kits that professional developers use. Instead of requiring a developer kit system usually costing thousands a community XNA game can be made on a regular Windows PC. The same developer tools can be used to develop games for the Zune music player.
The Community XNA games are completely sandboxed with their own virtual memory space and execution thread. This means that they can crash and not directly affect the system. They can save to a virtual save file within the game program but they can't corrupt or affect your other save data. They have completely closed communication ports outside of the Xbox Live network, this means that they can't read external data off the Internet like using real weather reports, image feeds or news feeds but they can't make spyware using them since Community XNA game programs can't access the net directly. They have all the same access to the Xbox 360's processing power, graphics effects, sound effects, networking and 3d rendering power as all the grownup games.
The new Xbox 360 Dashboard OS update is coming soon and it is going to be one of the biggest changes to the Xbox 360 since the system hit the market.
It is going to include the first complete redesign of the Xbox interface called the NXE by all the cool kids. The New Xbox Experience (NXE) is going to be the best thing to hit the Xbox and it is going to completely redefine how we use it.
One of the niftiest things at Penny Arcade Expo 08 was seeing the new Xbox dashboard. Xbox Live's own Major Nelson showed it off. He made sure to stress that it is still a work in progress and that there was an army of programmers over in Redmond that were cranking out code and testing it as he gave the demo.
As a side note if you ever go to a game expo or press event and Major Nelson asks you not to film something in the presentation and you do it anyway and then go on and keep on filming after he notices you and calls you out and you don't stop it then you are a total schmuck.
I've always thought that Microsoft's biggest advantage in their fight with Sony and Nintendo was software innovation. Let me tell you why:
New Interface
So far the new user interface design looks well designed, clean and very efficient. It sort of resembles Windows Media Center and the Zune OS. They really are putting in a lot of effort into trying to reduce the amount of clicks required to perform a task. It is much faster and looks like a totally new product. . I am glad that they are taking their time with it and is about as major as the change as the jump from the original Xbox to the 360.
They moved all the current functions from the current dashboard and moved it to the guide. That means you can pull up all the existing blades by hitting the big green Guide button on the controller. Information on a game from Xbox.com on the game in your disc tray or an Xbox Live Arcade game is loaded when the game is selected. They showed this off at PAX
At PAX I could not get an answer about if the new OS will be able to fast forward audio files to the middle of a long song or podcast or if it will be able to play a video from a playlist (that would help me sort out my video in iTunes or on my media server) but Major Nelson said that it was filed as feature request.
Overall I really liked the look at it.
Community XNA Games
I think while the new interface is getting all the press attention the feature with the most potenial to change the video game market is Community XNA games.
Towards the back of the PAX show floor there was a booth manned by some of the folks at Microsoft that have been working on the XNA community games. They had a PC with an RPG game opened up in Game Studio and an Xbox 360 with several community games running on it. I had a whole slew of pretty technical questions about the Community games program and got a lot of direct answers.
The concept was to have a program to encourage amateur video game developers on the Xbox 360. It has the potential to be a new market in video games between professionally funded games and shareware. XNA Community games developer can join the XNA developers club for the cost two new games a year and get access to some of the same software development tool kits that professional developers use. Instead of requiring a developer kit system usually costing thousands a community XNA game can be made on a regular Windows PC. The same developer tools can be used to develop games for the Zune music player.
The Community XNA games are completely sandboxed with their own virtual memory space and execution thread. This means that they can crash and not directly affect the system. They can save to a virtual save file within the game program but they can't corrupt or affect your other save data. They have completely closed communication ports outside of the Xbox Live network, this means that they can't read external data off the Internet like using real weather reports, image feeds or news feeds but they can't make spyware using them since Community XNA game programs can't access the net directly. They have all the same access to the Xbox 360's processing power, graphics effects, sound effects, networking and 3d rendering power as all the grownup games.
