XNA Game Studio 4.0!
…will be
- Hardware accelerated 3D API’s on Windows Phone 7 Series [Ed. notice the lack of Zune HD in there…]
- Visual Studio 2010 integration with our toolset [Ed. what a surprise…]
- Added buffered audio support to the Audio API’s [Ed. could be interesting…]
Update: Michael Klucher has a somewhat more wordy version up on his blog. From what it seems:
- Xbox LIVE API on Windows Phone 7 Series seems to be available to Xbox LIVE partners only (did anyone actually expect it to be open to everyone?)
- The dead born Zune and Zune HD support will stay in XNA GS 3.1 (R.I.P.)
- The buffered audio support is said to have been requested by lots of users; I wonder if that means runtime writable buffers…
Update 2: The GDC 2010 press release is on the XNA Creators Club Online site now.
Update 3: …which seems to indicate that XNA Game Studio 4.0 is for Windows Phone 7 Series only? Oh Microsoft, if someone really can confuse its customers than it is you…
Update 4: …but that seems to be Very Bad Wording (in the FAQ) only.
Update 5: The Shawn to the rescue with some more details:
- New platform
- Windows Phone 7 Series
- New features
- Integrates with Visual Studio 2010
- Dynamic audio output [Ed. Hui]
- Microphone input [Ed. necessary for the phone side of things, eh?]
- BasicEffect has four new siblings [Ed. or the mutant samples]
- SkinnedEffect
- EnvironmentMapEffect
- DualTextureEffect
- AlphaTestEffect
- Improved portability and usability
- Collapsed graphics caps into just two profile levels: Reach and HiDef [Ed. that’s nice]
- Many graphics API improvements [Ed. We demand details!]
- This involves some breaking API changes [Ed. We do not care (too much) about that!]
- Split Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll into several assemblies, to make it more obvious which pieces are available on each platform [Ed. this could be a bit of a concern]
Update 6: I might as well add some tidbits about the marketplace to come:
Windows® Phone Marketplace hub: But we also remain committed to independent developers. Windows Phone 7 Series includes the Windows® Phone Marketplace hub, where apps and games will be sold. Both independent and professional developers can offer games as apps via Marketplace, giving consumers a wide array of games to choose from. Charlie Kindle, the partner group program manager for Windows Phone 7 Series, talked a little more about this in a blog post last week.
Update 7: How could I even forgot to share the release date? “XNA Game Studio 4.0 will be available in the coming month, so get ready to jump on board!” (quoted from the press release)
Silver Sprite 3.0 Alpha 2
Bill "Silent Assasin" Reiss has brought word of an Alpha 2 build of SilverSprite 3.0. You can grab the source and start playing with it right away
http://silversprite.codeplex.com/
SilverSprite enables you to get your XNA game working inside Silverlight with minimal fuss. It's worth checking out and if you're interested in Windows Phone 7 development, then this is an ideal starting point.
Here's a recent blog post discussing the Alpha in a little more detail. Read More
KiloWatt Animation for XNA
Jwatte has tweeted news prediction of a new version of his KiloWatt animation library and Pre-release bits are here.
"This is the third-and-a-half release of the KiloWatt Animation library. It is intended as a companion to the kW X-port 3ds Max X file exporter, to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. This release is for version 3.0/3.1 for Windows and Xbox 360. Sorry, no Zune support 
"
He goes on to explain how this is different to the XNA Skinning sample on the creators website
The KiloWatt Animation Library is different from the XNA Skinning sample code in several ways, including:
- KiloWatt Animation stores animation keyframes as position, rotation and scale (for a total of 10 floats), instead of the full matrix used by the Animation Components.
- KiloWatt Animation removes unnecessary keyframes (down to a tolerance that you can specify), for a usually quite significant savings in file size.
- KiloWatt Animation does interpolation between animation keyframes using quaternions, which means that slow-motion and varispeed playback will still look smooth.
- KiloWatt Animation supports composition (blending) of animations to generate the final output pose for a given Model.
- KiloWatt Animation replaces the Effect used for your Model only when you tell it to.
- KiloWatt Animation does not make any specific demands of your geometry; you can (and should) use it to animate rigid objects such as windmills, catapults etc. in addition to skinned meshes.
Article: Draw me a line (Zune HD)
by Sgt. Conker
This article will show you how to create a dotted line based on touch input from the Zune HD.
This can be very useful for indicating to the user a path a game entity is going to take.
If you've ever played Flight Control for the iPhone you'll know exactly what I mean.
The XNA Developer’s Survival Kit
Nelson Hurst maintains “a list of resources to assist them with creating better games, custom engines and most of all to help them raise the bar for titles existing in the XBLIG Library. […] The XDSK will provide you with valuable libraries, engines, techniques, articles to broaden your understanding of the XNA Framework and more”.
Update: Credit where credit is due: Initially shared by The Shawn.
Distance field based decal rendering
Rim van Wersch shares an XNA Framework implementation of the Valve paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects, presenting “[a] simple and efficient method […] which allows improved rendering of glyphs composed of curved and linear elements. A distance field is generated from a high resolution image, and then stored into a channel of a lower-resolution texture.”
Performance Timers for XNA
Someone with the name Aphid released XNA Performance Timers:
XNA PerformanceTimers is designed to allow you to profile the CPU time spent in different sections of your code, possibly by multiple threads, on the Xbox360.
Results are drawn by a DrawableGameComponent in the top left corner of the screen. Multiple data views are available, including:
- Raw time spent in each tracker
- Percentage of time each thread spends in each tracker
- Percentage of time each thread spends in each tracker, with same-named threads grouped together into one entry.
- Percentage of time spent in each tracker by any thread.
Hat tip to SteveKr of XNA.mag fame.
Simple GPGPU framework
Rim van Wersch of XNAInfo.com fame released a simple framework to perform general purpose calculations on the GPU with the XNA Framework. The framework comes with two demos: one to compute Pi and the other is a simple particle system.
Head over to Simple GPGPU framework to download the code.
Choosing A Network Library in C#
Christopher M. Park has a nice write up about the challenges he faced when implementing network support for his game AI War.
[…] I've been meaning to blog about how I chose my network library, and what I think of it, yet have failed to do so. This was particularly important to me because (spoiler alert) I really love the networking library I'm currently using and think the guy making it is also a real class act.
Continue to read the rest of the story in Chosing [sic] A Network Libary in C#.
Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 2)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the second part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in adding our hero to the game, and have him interact with the platforms and blocks that make up the level.