More on XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Windows Phone Support
Says the Klucher through the tweets of The Shawn:
Demo [Harvest, developed by Luma Arcade] looks awesome, full 3D, animating characters. More will be shown at MIX next week.
The game loop on the phone is similar to existing platforms, but tweaked for power efficiency.
The phone graphics is an evolution of the existing immediate mode rendering API, 2D and 3D:
- New configurable effects: BasicEffect, SkinnedEffect, EnvironmentMapEffect, DualTextureEffect, AlphaTestEffect
- Custom programmable shaders are not supported on the phone
- Image scaler:
- lets you render to any size backbuffer, and have this automatically scaled to fill the screen
- lets the same game run on both 800x480 and 480x320 display sizes without special coding
- provides automatic rotation to support portrait, landscape left, and landscape right modes
- the image scaler is free: it uses dedicated hardware so does not consume any GPU
Portability: the ability to target three screens. Portability lets you target more sockets with a smaller time investment. Portability is not just about the same game running on different platforms, it is also valuable to share infrastructure, knowledge, etc.
Framework feature profiles:
- Reach: broad base of devices including phones
- HiDef: Windows and Xbox only
“Focus on being a game developer, not plumbing the underlying technology”
“Michael Klucher plugs forums.xna.com, says our MVP's are awesome and do a great job answering questions.”
“Michael Klucher gets applause!”
The will be more talk about the Marketplace and the Windows Phone emulator at the MIX next week.
XACT is part of the HiDef feature profile, so not on the phone: use SoundEffect (+ 4.0 enhancements) on the phone.
Ozymandias has an article about how to get in touch with Microsoft to get access to Xbox LIVE on the phone.
Update (2010-03-11 02:31 GMT): The Shawn has another blog post up, high-level-detailing some Windows Phone support related work done.
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)
Would you like George’s input?
Well, not George's input, but yours! George's new sample demonstrates a wrapper around input that you can easily use in your games.
And while you're there, you can give him some feedback, because he always appreciates it, and would like to know what he can do to help everyone. Because he's the "good" MVP, apparently 
And btw, for those that came back from Mars recently, George is THE MAN behind XNADevelopment.com, a great site for beginner tutorials that are well written and easy to follow.
Report on Nick
Nick Gravelyn still seems to have too much time on his hand, because he keeps churning out stuff on his blog:
First he talks about resizing 2D arrays;
Then he comes back and craetes more extension methods for arrays;
Then he gives up on creating his own editor, and teaches us how to be lazy, like him.
Performance Tools: PerfHUD
Matt "Perf Analyzer" Pettineo has a new post about analyzing Direct3D performance using NVIDIA PerfHUD, where he goes into great deal about each feature of the tool. Read all about it on his blog.
Return of Light Pre Pass
Word just reached us that there's a new demo of how to use the light prepass technique in XNA. You can find it here.
How does it compare to the other article on light pre pass? Tell us in the comments
7 Day Challenge Number 6
David Amador announced the next XNA 7 Day Challenge. Check the his post for the full details.
Post Mortem: Gum Drop Celestial Frontier, Neo Terra and Impossible Shoota
This is the Post Mortem Mania edition.
This time, Elbert Perez doesn’t just share one or two, no, it’s a whole bunch of three Post Mortems: First, there’s the Gum Drop Celestial Frontier Post Mortem, as a second he wrote up a Neo Terra Postmortem and last but not least he dropped the Impossible Shoota Postmortem.
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.”
