“Now the Xbox isn’t just for playing, but also for creating awesome content,” said Chris Charla, director of ID@Xbox. “We’re excited to open the Xbox One to everyone so anyone can get started developing.”
More info: Starting today, anyone can turn their Xbox One into a dev kit for free - Polygon
Saw this yesterday, very cool idea I hope Sony does this sometime too! Does it have all the specs of a Dev Kit console though?
From what I’m reading you are limited to 1GB of RAM (and also limited CPU and GPU power) and restricted to UWP Apps. So yeah … not really that great.
Probably nice for App Developers or smaller games, so it’s a start.
But here’s from ArsTechnica: UWPs on XBox: Microsoft wants apps, not games
Does this mean we can start building for the XboxOne Using UE4?
Does this mean we have to apply for XboxOne publishing via Other licensing options - Unreal Engine
Would be cool to know the packaging / cooking procedure if this is possible with UE4.
Cheers
Greg
so basically nothing has changed as far as creating games for xbox one is concerned, what a surprise;).
No, it’s for UWP stuff only. Making native games still requires dev kit and approved participation from MS.
You can’t use it as a ‘dev kit’, you can just run your UWP code on it. Yeah, it’s pretty useless for games.
So it’s basically a compiler?
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No, compilers compile code. The new “dev mode” pretty much does not do anything but run UWP apps people build and run/push from Visual Studio to the console. The apps are run in a restricted virtual machine with various restrictions such as processing power and total of 1GB memory use allow max (when out of beta). This means even if they would allow games they would be most likely kinda like today’s top end mobile games (at best).
Well then…
There’s absolutely no point to it; for me at least.
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Well Unreal engine doesn’t support UWP apps/games yet, but game titles on Xbox one that go through the Xbox Live Creators Program (Which doesn’t have anywhere near the restrictions of the normal xbox game dev process) have access to 6 exclusive cores / 5gb ram and full access to DX 12 on the GPU, so for small to medium sized games this restriction is very reasonable and allows you to build a cool game without needing special licensing deals with Xbox and dedicated developer kit.
The other benefit is without any upfront investment on licensing / dev kit hardware and special relationships with Microsoft, you can start out on your game building journey, build an awesome game, run it on xbox, test it, potentially sell it through this program, but also have the potential to easily convert to the full ID@Xbox program later with a proper devkit because you’ll already have a game title to show.
Is there a way to run ue4 on a xbox one?