If you're an Xbox One owner, you can turn it into a dev kit. For FREE!

After a three-year-old promise, Microsoft has finally announced that starting from today, all users with retail Xbox One consoles will be able to turn them into developer kits for free of charge!

Read here: http://appgoodies.net/news/xbox-one-consoles-can-now-become-dev-kits-for-free/

What do you reckon?

 

I was watching the liveblog on Ars Technica and hoping for Phil to mention a Unity Technologies partnership in relation to this. Disappointed!

 

What I mean is some sort of demo showing a plain, old Unity PE building to a bog-standard console. It just wasn't clear from how they described it if you needed ID@XBOX approval *before* getting a Unity version ready for this. I'm sure you've got a blog post coming though

 

Cheers!

Looks like they really want apps though, according to a few articles :/

 

Yeah, I think I'll pop out and pick up an Xbox One tomorrow.

Also, I'm shocked this took so long to get a thread here. I nearly had to make it myself.

 

I was too tired to make it yesterday

 

I'm shocked it took MS so long to do this. Even if it is still just UWP and not the actual games partition.

 

In theory and in practice.

I saw an article on Slashdot about this and came here to see if anyone had tested it yet.

Looks like I might be among the first.

It took about an hour to get it all setup and configured. The longest part was downloading and installing the special build of the XboxOne OS.

Here's a screenshot of the "Developer Home" screen on my XboxOne:


And here's the Unity 5.x Standard Assets project running on my XboxOne:


This is fun.

 

Awesome work! Way to blaze the trail! I'm considering doing this but my XBox is set up in the living room which is no where near my main development machine... ARGH! Which they would allow wireless loading of apps like the Fire TV does. That way I could push it to the device and just walk across the house.

Of course, just because you get get something running on the XBox, doesn't mean you'll be able to get it released.

 

It's restricted though right? Heard something about 1GB Ram, limited CPU / GPU?

 

Why doesn't Sony do this? Not trying to stir up stuff, I'm actually curious why this isn't a more streamlined thing where console hardware (your target hardware) isn't acceptable as a dev console.

For example PC's. Literally develop and deploy on the same machine. Why can't you just deploy to your target hardware console and test?

 

They word that requirement in kind of a funny way.

They say you need a "physical connection between your XboxOne and PC." I'm using an ethernet switch. So the two are not really "directly" physically connected. It's not like I'm using a crossover cable between the two RJ45 jacks.

I have a feeling that the awkward wording of this requirement is just a mistranslation of "the two devices need to be on the same subnet."

With XNA, you did need an ethernet connection. WiFi was not supported. So they might have carried this forward.

But I've deployed UWP projects to tablets via WiFi before. None of my tablets have ethernet jacks.

I'll test doing a deployment to my XboxOne via WiFi and update this post shortly.

Update:

I was successfully able to deploy a Unity project to my Xbox One via WiFi.

It took a little longer to test this than I thought because I ran into an issue where all deployments (wired and wireless) were failing.

It seems like I ran into one of the known issues.

After following the advice to reboot into retail mode, then reboot back into dev mode, I was able to deploy apps again.

 

This seems... Very underwhelming.

The Xbox One has 8GB RAM, but UWP will only let you access 1GB. Sure, it'd be neat to be able to build something and test it on the Xbox, but it sounds like games will be more or less limited to mobile-level quality with just more screen real-estate and a controller for input.

It feels like you'd have to gimp your game to fit the resource limitation, when it's just as easy to build on your PC and play with a controller, and when you've progressed far enough along, apply with id@xbox and buy a dev kit. I actually feel like this will only serve to bring a flood of lower quality games onto the marketplace.

And on top of all that, participating in this program may affect my experience playing retail Xbox games?

 

Yes, it's basically a program to make mobile apps that also work on the console. The apps run in the app VM, not the game VM, so there are some extreme limitations. I guess these also apply to every other non-game app already on the console.

They still require ID@XBOX submission for games:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2016/03/xbox-one-dev-kit-universal-windows-platform-uwp-apps/

 

Worse ... just 488 MB in this preview version.

Luckily I have two XBones so tonight one gets blown away for dev mode.

 

I haven't tried it but what I heard was that you can currently only use around 500MB of mem, can't use wifi for debugging and dev mode can decrease the performance on normal games. Exiting the dev mode resets the device to factory settings and wipes all data

 

Here's the official word on Xbox One resources for UWP: System resources for UWP apps and games on Xbox One
It's not even 1GB right now. During the "Developer Preview" it's 448MB.

 

Uninstalling the "Developer Preview" is what resets your Xbox to factory default.

Exiting out of Dev mode, so you can play retail games, will not reset your Xbox.

 

Ok, probably misinterpretation between languages then (saw these in chat)

 

Exactly. It's a ploy to leverage the popularity of Xbox and Windows to (hopefully) provide life-support for their almost-nonexistent phone market. Lowest-common-denominator rules. Typical Microsoft -- somewhere in the late 90s their marketing drones gained waaaay too much decision-making authority and they've been making one bad decision after another ever since. Not that there haven't been successes, but it's usually "almost, but not quite..."

Oops, did I rant?

 

Yes, but you haven't filled the quota yet

 

Interesting, this article says that they won't publish games built with UWP.

But the demo they gave to introduce this feature at the Build conference was using Unity.

And the official known issues page has a specific section for games and game engines.

It feels like Microsoft's left hand is not talking to its right hand, which is nothing new.

Even if they don't end up allowing publishing games to the app store, I think this is great for prototyping and building demos for proofs of concept.

I know from experience that when you are presenting a demo to solicit funding, a vertical slice running on target hardware is more compelling than the same thing running on a laptop.

It's also great for hobbiests and the education market.

 

I took that to mean UWP games won't be allowed on the full-hardware-access games partition. They'll just be "apps"... but in some of the ID groups I'm in, we've never gotten a clear answer either (and I had mostly given up on ID before this announcement, so I haven't bothered to go check if any UWP games have shown up on the app side of the house).

 

Got excited by this and was all ready to test out my project until I read about the limitations. Seems a real shame, certainly looks like they're trying to target apps rather than games.

 

I was interested in something like this for ps4 for a brief period, to homebrew and play some games for myself. The interest died very quickly and I have a gaming desktop now. I wonder how long everyone else's interest will hold.

 

This was long overdue. However, it is odd that Microsoft limits the preview version to 488 MB of RAM and then strongly encourages people to build for x64. Even when Microsoft eventually lifts the limits to 1GB of RAM, it is still a silly limit in 2016, especially when Microsoft is telling developers to build for x64. It definitely makes sure developers using their retail XBox One boxes as devkits will know they are second class citizens compared to developers that received an official devkit. This seems like a sloppy rollout by Microsoft.

 

Could you walk through your steps. I'm using 5.3.4 and getting errors when I load the project into Visual Studio, even a blank Unity Project. This is my first go at the UWPs. I have the Dev Acct, the Visual Studio Update 2, the latest SDK, but as I said, errors (7) when the project loads.

Thanks,

TheLorax

Errors:

Severity Code Description Project File Line Suppression State
Error Unable to resolve Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.WindowsApps (>= 1.0.0) for UAP,Version=v10.0. 0
Error Unable to resolve Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.PersistenceChannel (>= 1.0.0) for UAP,Version=v10.0. 0
Error NuGet Package restore failed for project New Unity Project 2 for 'Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.WindowsApps (>= 1.0.0)'. 0
Error NuGet Package restore failed for project New Unity Project 2 for 'Microsoft.ApplicationInsights (>= 1.0.0)'. 0
Error NuGet Package restore failed for project New Unity Project 2 for 'Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.PersistenceChannel (>= 1.0.0)'. 0
Error Unable to resolve Microsoft.ApplicationInsights (>= 1.0.0) for UAP,Version=v10.0. 0
Error Your project.json doesn't list 'win10-x64' as a targeted runtime. You should add '"win10-x64": { }' inside your "runtimes" section in your project.json, and then re-run NuGet restore. New Unity Project 2

 

No, during //BUILD they specifically said it requires a hard wired connecting between your XB1 and your PC.

It was briefly mentioned during //BUILD

Because Microsoft copped out and did a little song and dance and wool pulling. They originally announced all consoles would be a dev kit, then they reversed course. Then Win10 came along, and now they've enabled it to be a "dev kit" by enabling you to deploy UWP applications to it. This is not the same thing folks in ID@Xbox are doing.

Some important things to note... right now it's essentially in "Beta". You can enable the dev kit mode but there's no way to disable it without factory resetting your box. Also Microsoft said that it may cause some retail games to stop working. So dabble with caution if you play a lot of games on your XB1.

Another important note. The initial beta dev kit mode limits you to 448 MB of ram. Once it goes RTM this summer, it will increase to 1GB. This is because it is designed only for UWP (Universal apps) so it has to fit into a memory constraint that will allow it to run on other devices as well.

So, the way I really see it is that Microsoft copped out by not really enabling full dev kit features, but instead enabled UWP publishing to the device and played it as if that was the plan all along. Either way, it's still cool that we can finally use them as dev kits.

 

My Xbox One is ususally hard wired to my router but, since the question was raised, I tested wifi deployment today (see my post above) and I can confirm that it worked.

 

I'm using Unity 5.3.4p1.

As I recall, there are a bunch of warnings that appear when you first open the project, but they don't prevent you from compiling and deploying.

I'll create and deploy a test project and take some screenshots of all the steps.

 

It's kind of an open secret at this point that there is going to be a hardware refresh for the Xbox One later this year. They are going to update it to support 4K TVs and 4K video streaming. And it's expected that they will include a stronger CPU/GPU as well. Sony is expected to do the same with the PS4. (I think it was Netflix that first leaked the info.)

I hope they will allow some of those improvements to trickle down to the UWP sandbox as well.

 

We just have another XBLA/XNA situation on our hands. Typical Microsoft. What will happen is ONLY shovelware games appearing on XBoxOne because Microsoft failed to deliver developers developing with their XBone same power they give developers developing with devkits thru ID@XBox. If they'd give same power to UWP or better yet, convert all xbones to be devkits, with free id@xbox access, there would be MOSTLY shovelware, but there would be good games too, just like on Steam.

But why I am expecting actual innovation from M$? After all, they've been playing catchup since their inception.

Microsoft's BASIC? Please, other BASIC dialects where much better (that came before MSBasic).
DOS? CP/M came before that and was basically the same (even drive letters were lifted from CP/M). On top of that, actual DOS wasn't Microsoft's product either. It was originally called QDOS and was developed by other company which Microsoft bought.
Next up, Windows. Can you believe what was it to be originally called? Interface (bwaghahkhekhe) Manager (bwahahahahahahah). But that's not important. What's important is, while Windows' code was admittedly theirs, it was released after Apple's OS. There was even lawsuit regarding look & feel, I think. again, cloning their competition and hoping for the best. Also MSPaint (at least prior to update in Win7) looks surprisingly similar to MacPaint. Hmmmm...

You could at least guess they were back to their senses, to actively innovate by the time internet came? Not so much. Bill Gates actually thought World Wide Web was a fad that will quickly die out. Uh-oh. Then Netscape came along and brought old Billy back to the reality. He then, instead of developing its own thing, bought a fledgling browser called Mosaic. Then he renamed it to much less imaginative "Internet Explorer" and the rest is history. I remember IE6 and (unsure here) IE7 still crediting Mosaic project in their About... window. IE11? Not so much. Perhaps more humiliating is the fact that IE11 carries the following user agent string: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko". It actually tries to tell sites that it is Mozilla and is "like Gecko" as in, "Please, I've changed, I'm like cool kids now, can I come in now to your party? Please?". Disgusting.

Since Windows 95, their OS stagnated. Not much to clone from, I guess. Then when Vista came about and what do we have there? Innovation? Nope! It's just Microsoft being Microsoft and copying again, incompetently. This time, Linux. x64 support, which was partially even in windows XP 64 (very hard to come by)? Was in Linux since x64 processors were a thing. Security improvements such as better protection of kernel? Was in Linux since its inception and Linux still does it better. Ok, so perhaps some fluff stuff, like Aero? Puh-lease! That's just inept clone of Compiz/Beryl (not sure which came first), except like 99.999% less awesome and 99.999% more GPU-heavy (Compiz could do some amazing stuff, more amazing than Aero on a freaking GeForce 2. Yes, as in, second GeForce to ever hit the market).

As for Windows 8's failure of the Start Screen, that was just Microsoft inept clone of only marginally less awful GNOME 3 Shell.

Microsoft wasn't also first to the console race, but here I can't really blame them, since they were still doing some BASIC work when first consoles with exchangeable games hit the market, pun intended. What can I blame them for is again cloning their competition and doing so ineptly and incompetently that the original xbox barely sold well enough for Microsoft staying in the market and making next one.

So yeah, I've never expected to be Microsoft to be frontrunners of innovation and if any of you expected it to be so, with all due respect, you're a fool.

 

True, but the XBLIG (XNA) issue was mostly due to poor curation of the store itself. XNA was really cool, but the development tools (Unity for example) have significantly improved because they offer more than just a framework to build on top of.

This may hold true in the games realm... and maybe because the Kinect, while limited in household use cases, was innovative. That being said, you should go back and watch the videos from BUILD. There are some really cool advancements. Today's session demoed Age of Ascent browser game and showed real time zero downtime updating of Azure Service Fabric services while the game was being played in flight. It was very cool. There are also some pretty sweet xamarin enhancements for debugging on devices and some very nice new Azure enhancements.

 

Was it stagnation? Or was it that the customer base was satisfied with it? Just look at what happened when they tried to drop the Start Menu with Windows 8. Didn't work too good for them did it? Look at GNOME 3. Plenty of people like it, but just as many people hated it and stayed on GNOME 2. People generally don't like change for the sake of change.

 

I've meant in time between Win95 and Vista. Also Windows 8's start screen was a little more than a glorified Program Manager from Win3.11 and an inept clone of (already hated) GNOME 3 Shell at the same time.

 

You might have a point if you limited your range of releases to Windows 9x and ME. It definitely stagnated during that time frame but Windows XP (both original and SP2) was a very clear change and people loved it enough that there are still people running it.

 

If by big changes you mean window skins, with that default awful one and slightly changed start menu (that you could change to look like in Win98), then sure...

 

No, I'm not referring to the Fischer Price theme. I'm referring to the fact that they finally completely dropped MS-DOS and brought the far superior NT line to everyone. Windows XP was their first consumer OS that actually impressed me.

 

Let's not forget their first line of 64-bit os's.

 

As someone who's actually been playing with this tech on and off for half a day now, I have to agree that Microsoft does indeed have a cynical ulterior motive here.

But it's even worse than you think!

I've now walked back and forth between my family room (where my Xbox One is) and my home office (where my Dev PC is) about 50 times.

This feels suspiciously like exercise!

Clearly, Microsoft is using this tech as a trojan horse to trick developers into adopting their healthy lifestyle agenda.

The shear impertinence...

 

Got enough of a budget for another Xbox One and a TV capture card?

 

The hardware limitations are a pain, but they're far from the end of the world. They won't be an issue for most games that most people make. For my prototypes I doubt they'll be an issue, and I'd much rather take an Xbox to events than a PC.

I'll be plugging mine in on my desk and using the multiple inputs on one of my monitors.

 

Depending on details if and as the program opens up, this might also be a really neat way to get gamers playing prototypes or early builds of your games. If UWP has or gets a beta program similar to those of Google Play or iTunes then you could potentially use that to get your game into more hands that are more relevant during the early stages of development.

 

Why the hell aren't you guys just using the Xbox app for Windows 10 and streaming? No need to go near your Xbox. Plug controller into your PC and stream. I even play a lot of my games that way.

 

I'm not sure if that will work. Dev Mode is very locked down. And very unstable. It's all early beta at this point.

If I ever got to the point where I really needed to debug something running on my Xbox One, I'd just bring it into my home office.

I'll probably buy a 2nd Xbox One anyway after the hardware refresh at the end of the year.

 

Too late, I already got a couple of Devkits sent by Microsoft.

 

Yeah but the official dev kit Xbox Ones are cooler