Just check out the following links.

PC World : Microsoft Gives Software to Nurture Future Coders

So probably in six month we will see such thing goes world wide. Anyway ... I'm no logger a student . If any student out there have the skill and interested, I might be able to help as adviser. Better yet, form a team of students for final year project or something academic,

Keep in mind that such project is good as a portfolio or sample works. Consider that game development is an evolving market. It helps to have early exposure.

Disclaimer : I am not associated with Microsoft, I am a mere developer who have lots of free time.

aww 6 months?

I graduate from a Diploma in Games Design course in 6 months. We've tried in the past to get teams to compete in games design compeitions outside Malaysia but we ran out of time to prepare ourselves for major events.

But regardless, this is a really good opportunity in building up the local organizations in the business in creating games and such. If you're interested I could establish connections through my lecturers and ultimately other major games design courses, even other similar education courses and training programs.

Thing is...you can't even select Malaysia from there. The only country available in Asia region is China...not even Singapore.

Oh well, maybe you can shoot some email to Microsoft MY, they might do something. Also i think the fee for XNA is pretty cheap...100USD per annual??




Go make us proud!

I don't feel the vibe of XNA . Perhaps too much limitation.

Cheers!

No malaysia ah?
Aiyo...

Malaysia needs to stop Piracy

Locally, MMU student already enjoyed similar kind of privilege since few years back through their Microsoft lab. Students fill up a form, ask for lecturer's approval and then pass back to the lab. Then the lab will give you the software. Many2 softwares are available I believe.

bhead: Yeah, try contacting Microsoft about it. Which college you are from? There might some Microsoft students ambassador at your college. You can approach that person also.

latios: There's still the free XNA Xpress. You can build and run games for Windows but to deploy it on 360, that's where the USD 99 annual fee for XNA Creators Club comes.

Yes XNA Express studio + Visual Studio Express Edition is totally free to develop game for Windows based, but have to pay license fee to develop game in Xbox 360 which is quite reasonable lah i think. Develop game in XNA can be done using C# .NET which is quite good for game development because u dont have to worry about pointer and garbage collection for unnecessary memory usage and it is fully object oriented. .NET have better memory management and a lot of features compare to C++ to speedup the game development life cycle. Since my current job as a .NET Programmer, i can say that .NET and XNA is the good starting point to develop good game with less development time.

This post has been edited by ron4: Feb 21 2008, 12:45 PM

Now if schools can get access to PartnetNet I'm going to start thinking about a game design course.