We've just finished our Kinect enabled application and its currently in review with Microsoft. It's gone through 3 reviews and the last review the MS developers failed us for 2 specific issues
1. our application on the latest beta SDK was exceeding 130MB continuously even when pushed to the background, apparently api's have changed in how applications are pushed to the background and certain events we were wiring up to no longer ran in a particular order. We needed to rework quite a lot of code to remedy this.
2. we made use of new DirectX 11.5 api's around prt's and we were not correctly clearing out the memory, even thou it is now unified we still need to ensure that memory is cleared out correctly. We missed this because of how the render planes work, they changed in the last update and these planes are now nicely virtualized BUT before a plane is pushed to the background and before its virtualized we need to wire up an event to close connections and clear/dispose objects.
It's taken us 4 days to make these changes and as of this morning we've submitted what we hope is our last package to!
We already have 2 apps , this is our third and we hope we can make the cut for launch.
My fellow developers in the AAA Game studio, myself am in the APP studio, are in the last sprint before submission for review. They needed to rework the engine from ground up to take advantage of PRT's .. PRT's are a serious game changer, I have seen the textures they designers are coming up with , massively massive textures that span huge surface areas of a world all within a single texture. It's amazing what I've seen coming out from my fellow game developers/designers. And the real-time ray tracing (path) is a sight to behold, the global illumination and particle systems in our new engine is something I would not have thought possible for many years. You will be blown away when you see this hopefully on launch date..
Microsoft are clearly being very cautious on it's dev boxes/servers and its sdk's, there are daily check ups from the MS guys ensuring the boxes are not tampered with. Also the lockdown of our development offices is insane, its like those Intel adverts where the scientist is wearing a blue overall suite and they go into a sealed room with only what there wearing. It's the same for us, our development offices are closed off and in the last 3 months the number of security cards have pretty much tripled. Lots of security for us coders, but its also very exciting.
It's clear from my use of the sdk and the development environment that MS are definitely on track, they have a brilliant developer story that I know other developers will fall in love with once its public.
One last thing, my fellow game developer colleagues have pretty much said that they believe the Xbox is severely more powerful than the PS4, they were very surprised with just how much.. They've spent a great deal of effort reducing certain game textures/animations and the engine in general just to get a decent 60fps on the PS4. Clearly in their eyes the Xbox is leaps and bounds ahead of the PS4.
Can't wait for you all to see our game and apps hopefully on reveal day, but definetely at launch!
