I've been using the
XNA Game Studio since the 1.0 beta. For those who don't know, XNA Game Studio is Microsoft's latest (and greatest) attempt to allow developers to create games for the PC, XBox 360, and the
Zune. XNA provides several tools, the most important of which is to provide a wrapper for DirectX. For those of you who have written managed DirectX games in the past, this is a HUGE improvement.
I've been using the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP since it was released. Version 2 only worked in Visual Studio 2005 (which was strange, since it came out after Visual Studio 2008 was released). Version 3 is great, not only because it loads in Visual Studio 2008, but because it allows me to use
LINQ and has a host of new improvements. My only problem with version 3.0 has been the lack of an upgrade wizard for 2.0 projects.
Yesterday,
the XNA team announced XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta will be released next week. My most anticipated improvement? The XNA 2.0 upgrade wizard.
Some other features of the beta include:
Zune-specific features
- Support for the upcoming Zune 3.0 firmware - note that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP will not be compatible with the 3.0 firmware. My colleague Michael Klucher posted a summary of this issue on his blog, including steps to remove 3.0 CTP games from your Zune since they will no longer work with the 3.0 firmware
- Zune deployment from 64-bit OS's
Xbox 360-specific features
- Xbox 360 project templates are available
- Big button pad support
XNA Framework and Visual Studio features
- Rich presence, invites and join session in progress
- Content compression
- FBX importer improvements
- ClickOnce deployment for Windows games
- Project upgrade wizard to automatically upgrade XNA Game Studio 2.0 games
- Multiple content projects
- Cross-platform project synchronization
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