New Microsoft programming software shown on campus

A representative from Microsoft came to campus Friday to provide a sneak peek of the software giant's latest game programming tool.\nMicrosoft XNA Game Studio Express will make it easier for aspiring designers to make homemade programs because a lot of the coding is already available in the Express program. \nThe final version will be available to download for free before the end of the year, but there is an annual $99 charge in order to get the games to run on an Xbox 360.\n"This is nothing revolutionary in terms of technology," said Krishna Kumar, a Microsoft academic developer. "The biggest advantage is that it lets amateur programmers target a hitherto closed platform."\nDuring a 90-minute presentation at the School of Informatics, Kumar showed how he could create a basic grassland to explore or a highly detailed gun that could be rotated around the screen with a few clicks.\nAs long as the content is original, programmers will be able to sell their games online or possibly even through Microsoft's downloadable Xbox Live Arcade service if they become popular enough, he said.\n"We're hoping to see smaller games for the whole audience," Kumar said. "We're looking for everything from little kids' games that help them with counting."\nIf the games are highly successful, they could be ported to other consoles as well since all rights remain with the creator, which pleased sophomore Scott Gill.\n"If you have a lot of success with it, I'd hope you would be able to port it to other systems," he said.\nThe software has a lot of academic potential as well. The program could be used in some IU classes next year. Other universities plan to use it for 3-D modeling of complex structures such as DNA, Kumar said.\nR.J. Smith, an Informatics graduate student and a graduate of the video game programming school Digipen, said the software is a good way to get young people interested in game design, but it's not for the inexperienced.\n"To really use XNA, you have to learn how to program," he said. "You have to be able to do math and have the logic. You need to be able to think like a programmer."\nSmith also took issue with the wide-open framework of XNA on Windows, which could allow hackers to plant viruses in community programs.\nNo such problems should exist with the Xbox 360 version.\n"I worry about the Windows component not requiring a signature or being secured," Smith said. "Other programs, like Java, run in a sandbox (a security measure in the Java development environment) in the so other programs can't get on to your hard disk."\nMore information and a free beta version of XNA is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/.