Quote: Original post by HelplessFool
Sorry, I overstepped my domain. I don't know the exact differences in freedom between XNA and what a regular 360 Dev with kits would be.

For one, support for networking. For two, support for native libraries (Havok).

Quote: Original post by NickGravelyn
I really would like to hear what you feel is missing from it. (In seriousness; I'm not trying to put you down or say you are wrong or anything. I would like to know what people feel is missing so I may be able to pass that to the XNA team at some point).

I've mentioned this before, but my biggest issue with XNA games is the lack of SIMD access. I know, from being a "real" 360 dev at work just how much power is locked away because we don't have access to that. For example in a recent chunk of messing about I was applying proper physics to particles. In a single thread my i7 @ 2.6Ghz was 9x faster than the 360 at the same work. Granted, not all of this is going to be floating point power, I dare say the compact framework vs "normal" has some effect as well.

Granted, this would require a whole SIMD thing for .Net in general to make it happen, but it would still be nice.

I've also often wondered why there isn't an ngen like step in the compile/deploy process which can be taken advantage of?

Has anyone here used the Wii homebrew channel before? I want to try it out because my warranty already expired, are there any risks involved?

I am reading more and more lately about Wii homebrew stuff.

Why is this suddenly taking off?

Is this a natural reaction to there being so many Wii's out there, and not a huge number of games?

Quote: Original post by 3DModelerMan
Has anyone here used the Wii homebrew channel before? I want to try it out because my warranty already expired, are there any risks involved?

I'm yet to install the homebrew channel on my Wii, but from what I understand it doesn't pose much of a risk to your console. I don't think it can cause any damage (i.e. brick your Wii), it just gets installed like any other channel and from that point on is indistinguishable from a "real" channel.

I even modded my Wii recently (which isn't required for homebrew) and besides needing a triangular screwdriver, it was dead simple. The newer chips don't require soldering, you just have to un-plug/plug-in a few cables... You can even turn the chip off (and update them with firmware/FPGA patches) in the event that a system-update comes out that is capable of detecting your mod. Having a modded Wii makes homebrew simpler in theory, but in practice homebrew people tend not to talk about hardware mods because of it's links to illegal activities...


Personally, I'm really waiting for some good Wii homebrew graphics demos. The Wii GPU is highly underrated/underused IMO.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
The Wii GPU is highly underrated/underused IMO.

heh, thanks for my first laugh of the day [grin]

(I know what the GPU specs are on that thing, the infomation however is stuck behind a big NDA wall so I can't say more than that.)

Quote: Original post by phantom
Granted, this would require a whole SIMD thing for .Net in general to make it happen, but it would still be nice.

Such as the Parallel Extensions being introduced in .NET 4?

Quote: Original post by superpig

Quote: Original post by phantom
Granted, this would require a whole SIMD thing for .Net in general to make it happen, but it would still be nice.

Such as the Parallel Extensions being introduced in .NET 4?

I was under the impression that was all thread based, not opening up the SSE/VMX registers for general use with batch floating point ops

I've heard suggestions that it will eventually do vector ops as well. After all, if the language is sufficiently expressive, then all it needs is tools that are smart enough - if the runtime can detect that every op in a parallel algorithm is viable to be done by SSE, then it should be able to implement the parallelization as SSE. Being able to express that each component is independent of the others is important, along with sufficient datastore control (e.g. alignment/packing).

ah, I hadn't heard that. It would certainly be pretty handy/cool indeed.