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"Dev Kits"

Should dev kits be available to the general public? In a way i think yes as it could increase the quality of new ideas which could be used in gaming. But in another way i think no as this could harm the consoles themselves as i think the kits could be used to play non-official games, which i think may boil down to piracy. What do you think?

I'm going to borrow my mate's compiler and learn C++.

That DARK BASIC thing looks quite good. I may have to get that at some point.

Look out for YH Game Studio releasing games for your console next year some time....


:-)

"DARK BASIC 3D GAMES DESIGNER. Create your own awesome 3D PC games with this fun, easy to use software. Designed to enable gamers to program great looking 3D games including first person shoot 'em ups, racing and flight sims quickly and easily. Encompassing the versatility of BASIC and the power of Direct X."

Available from SR, funnily enough, just type in "Dark Basic" into the search engine and voila.

The makers of Dark Basic have another package coming out in September which has a revamped interface, making it a lot easier and quicker to use, they even state that you can be up and running playing an original game in your favourite genre in seconds.

I think if you want to develop games easily, you should stick with the PC. This is for simplicity and through easy use of Direct X.
Dark Basic is one of the best development tools. It has a library of programming tools and utilities you can download from the web.
If you must develop for a console, I'd start with the gameboy, there are several development kits available on the web + they don't need to do anything complex. They've all been around for ages, so the bugs have been ironed out. Game engines can be written relatively easily if you have programming experience.
You can also buy blank gameboy cartridges + burner for your pc to play the games on the console.
The problem with the new consoles is that all the good graphic and sound engines are developed seperatly by software houses. It's these engines that hold the key to the games. It would take you forever to come up with an engine which even slightly resembles that in a PS2 game.

turbonutter wrote:
> Some of the Yaroze games were pretty good actually.

Nobody said they wasn't. I enjoyed some of the games that people had taken the time to make.

Some of the Yaroze games were pretty good actually.

It would be good if this happened, but wouldn't it be expensive. I mean, the Yaroze, wasn't that something like £500 to buy.

Console companies rarely mass release development kits as these kits would probably play anything you put into them (even a pirate CD). Hopefully though Microsoft may release a development kit for the X-box for use on a PC, where you can program games for it on your PC. That would encourage budding young programmers.

Sony have confirmed a Linux based dev kit for the PS2, and they are releasing a limited number (2000 i think) in Japan alone. OPSM2 says we have to send loads of emails to sony europe to try and get them to bring it out in this country.

Someone post the right email address please...

Home programming was really huge in the days of the speccy, and many home programmers were talent spotted from this and are now writing for the likes of the ps2. Though the average joe isnt going to churn out MGS3, new ideas will flow, and at least give the games writers a few good ideas. maybe get some average joes some jobs.

The PSone Net Yaroze was a PSone dev kit. Maybe Sony will release the same for the PS2.