Item — HN Reader

Agreed, the Xbox documentation is hot garbage. They expect you to flip flop between the .chm file shipped with the XDK and online, but like you say the links are almost always broken. On the flip side though the private Xbox dev forums are awesome, I find them more useful than the docs.

Sony's PS4/PS5 docs also suck and are a giant pain in the ass to get to because they make you allow-list only specific IP addresses (a nightmare during the pandemic), but at least they are all in one place.

1 comments

Yeah, xbox forums are very very good, and you usually get a reply directly from someone on the Xbox Development team within few hours. If you ever get a chance to go to XFest(assuming they still continue after the pandemic), it's really worth going - you get to meet people actually working on the hardware and software, collecting some of their emails goes a long way when working on a game ;-)

And yes, PS4/PS5 documentation is....lacking. It's all in one place and at least easily searchable but most functions have descriptions 2 sentences long and you have to look in the samples for the actual knowledge of how to call something.

Haha, yes, direct emails for folks in xbox is very useful, the xfest advice is very solid.

I actually went from working at a first party studio inside Microsoft to an indie company, so luckily I have my network to fall back on. Now I just need to work out how to do the same for Sony and Nintendo...

There _used_ to be a Japanese game developers mixer at GDC (not sure if it's still around) - I met some folks from Nintendo there, though nobody specifically on the hardware side. Worth a shot, though. :)