Tutorials creation request

[UlisesMilles]

Hi. I need an official tutorial for this sdk. I know that for some people a few samples with comments are more than enough but there are some people that cannot figure out what to do with just a few samples. Maybe there are some tutorials out there but either I missed them or I couldn't find them.
If anyone knows about such tutorial, (and no, not the tutorials from the official microsoft XDK) I'd appreciate if you could link them here or something

[JayFoxRox]

What do you have/want to learn?

We have installation instructions in the wiki, you can learn C using any tutorial and nxdk provides popular libraries like SDL (which wraps basic audio, input and mostly 2D rendering).
These should be enough for many users, but if you want to get most out of the hardware and want something uniquely specific for the Xbox, then a tutorial won't be able to convey all the needed information - it's a complicated system.
GPU programming in nxdk (and the Xbox hardware) follows older OpenGL and nvidia concepts. You can find libraries which simplify the GPU a bit, like https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/pbgl - OpenGL tutorials should suffice then.

If that's not enough, your best resource about Xbox specifics is probably to debug actual games. Emulators could help here.
If you feel adventurous you can also use tools like https://github.com/XboxDev/nv2a-trace and also tools like https://github.com/JayFoxRox/xbox-tools/tree/master/python-scripts which can be used to dump the state of a real system.
abaire also has a bunch of hardware tests for the GPU to analyze behaviour: https://github.com/abaire/nxdk_pgraph_tests .
For additional audio information there's code in the emulators and some background information in https://xboxdevwiki.net .

For most applications you shouldn't need the audio processor (APU), but if you want to use it you are probably on your own as there's no driver in nxdk for it.
I'd suggest to create your own OpenAL-like interface for it if you want to use it.

Installation/testing of your application depends on how you modded your Xbox or how you set up your emulator (but works like installing any other homebrew).

Debugging is best done by building your project for your development machine (with Xbox as a secondary target / port) and porting unavailable libraries (to your development machine). That way you can get tools which couldn't possibly work on actual Xbox hardware (like valgrind etc.). This is also how it's done for many other embedded systems / video games.

[UlisesMilles]

What do you have/want to learn?

We have installation instructions in the wiki, you can learn C using any tutorial and nxdk provides popular libraries like SDL (which wraps basic audio, input and mostly 2D rendering). These should be enough for many users, but if you want to get most out of the hardware and want something uniquely specific for the Xbox, then a tutorial won't be able to convey all the needed information - it's a complicated system. GPU programming in nxdk (and the Xbox hardware) follows older OpenGL and nvidia concepts. You can find libraries which simplify the GPU a bit, like https://github.com/fgsfdsfgs/pbgl - OpenGL tutorials should suffice then.

Hi, I knew about the installation instructions. and I already know C. I don't care that much about the xbox's GPU specifics. I think you miss understood what I was requesting (probably because I don't know how to express myself. Sorry about that). You know when you are trying to learn (for example) OpenGL or something like that, there are these websites like https://learnopengl.com/ that tell you where to start doing stuff, how to do it why and so on. Well I was looking for something like that (or like this or this) something that will kind of guide you step by step how are those samples made, why do they use this or that. I mean, I can mess around with already written code, just as you said, but it will most certainly take me longer to learn that way that providing a tutorial similar to what I already mentioned.

And please if someone knows of the existence of such tutorial, please let me know.

By the way, I am trying to make a game, not just an application (I know that it's more or less the same thing but just to clarify).

I have been considering doing the game on the official XDK from microsoft since there are a lot of tutorials for it, but the down side is that it is copyrighted code and is illegal to distribute it. Or maybe OpenXDK since there are a few tutorials like the ones I mentioned for it. But I'd really like developing my game with nxdk.

[JayFoxRox]

My point was:

• Any SDL tutorial will suffice (Lazy Foo for example: https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php etc.).
• With pbgl, some OpenGL 1.1 tutorials should suffice ("legacy tutorials" on nehe for example: https://nehe.gamedev.net/ ; or the red-book: http://mutantstargoat.com/~nuclear/tmp/redbook.pdf ).

There might be a tiny bit of initialization code necessary, but you can look at the existing nxdk samples or the documentation of projects like pbgl (pbgl_init(GL_TRUE); is mentioned in the pbgl README).

These libraries, however, are higher-level abstractions, so they abstract away some Xbox specific details and it's not possible to get the last bit of performance out of the hardware (same as the Microsoft XDK - which is even more limited because it's even less suitable for the hardware). So if you need the last bit of performance, you have to analyze how games / hardware works and bring your own drivers - but that'd be beyond the scope of any tutorial.

Well I was looking for something like that (or like this or this) something that will kind of guide you step by step how are those samples made

Most of those tutorials are poor quality.
They were still useful as code-samples back in the day because almost no other resources existed. But the "tutorial" portion of these (which should teach the background) are sentences like "don't be scared, we are going to add the following code now: <200 lines of barely commented source-code>".

Or maybe OpenXDK since there are a few tutorials like the ones I mentioned for it.

OpenXDK has been dead for a long time. nxdk reused some parts, but heavily improved them. OpenXDK needed tutorials because it developed its own APIs.
For nxdk you don't need such tutorials because most APIs are not Xbox specific anymore. Example: By the time nxdk was created, SDL2 had already created its own API to handle "Xbox 360"-like gamepads, so it made sense to simply support the same API in nxdk (and there are plenty of pre-existing SDL2 tutorials about this API).

nxdk also has better support for win32 APIs and libc for file-system access, so many higher-level abstractions will simply work. This means if a non-Xbox-specific library works on Xbox, you can also use any tutorial - it doesn't have to be Xbox specific.

By the way, I am trying to make a game, not just an application (I know that it's more or less the same thing but just to clarify).

With almost no effort, popular libraries like ozz-animation, newton-dynamics, glm and enet simply work in nxdk (because it provides enough of the Windows / POSIX / C interfaces to support these projects). Any tutorials for these libraries will then also "just work" - there's barely any Xbox specific code necessary.

Likewise, there are competing libraries for these and most of them will probably also work out of the box.
So the libraries mentioned above are simply those that I tried because I knew them and they were popular - and they barely needed any changes to work in nxdk.
The XDK instead provided its own APIs for these, so it needed to provide the tutorials, too.
If you wanted to use those libaries on the XDK or OpenXDK they often don't work because those don't provide many of the underlying popular APIs or they use outdated C standards / tooling, so nxdk is almost always the better choice.
Even if it doesn't work in nxdk (yet) you can almost always fix it quite easily - with the XDK you'll fight a black box of ancient tooling.

A couple of years ago I have locally tested a lot of popular C/C++ libraries with nxdk and the majority worked with minimal changes (to nxdk or the libraries themselves).
Some of it is here JayFoxRox#84 and you can find some traces of this when I requested changes to fix these issues in libraries which had problems with nxdk (some of which has been fixed by now):

• Implicit conversion from const uint64_t to size_t for SmartNodeManager::kInvalidReferenceId Auburn/FastNoise2#42
• Allow platform independent compilation of individual renderers effekseer/Effekseer#668
• Incorrect check for SSE effekseer/Effekseer#666
• Installation and building of tools should be optional with CMake craigsapp/midifile#90
• make install attempts to install to system-root (/kissfft) mborgerding/kissfft#65
• ...

There were also ports of popular games like VVVVVV and Heart of Darkness which barely needed any changes to compile with nxdk.
For Heart of Darkness, most of the required code was support for Windows APIs: https://github.com/JayFoxRox/hode/pull/1/files and the build-system (where nxdk doesn't have a strong opinion on what you should use). The same can be said about Prince of Persia: NagyD/SDLPoP@master...Ryzee119:SDLPoP:xbox - build-system, bypassing keyboard input etc.

Again: No Xbox specific tutorials were necessary, because they don't have to contain (much) platform specific code and nxdk provides popular APIs (which these games already used).