Nazeeh’s Little Corner on the Web

So! Wanna try writing a few games on your Zune V1 and 2 device? Maybe even have it be a multiplayer game as well? Or maybe you just want to write a nifty frontend to your music library! All of that and more can be done with the newly released preview of the upcoming version 3.0 of XNA Game Studio.

It does support Visual Studio 2008 of course but ONLY allows development on Zune and PC, there is no Xbox 360 support with this release. You can install this side by side with your current installation of XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

Read more about it here. If you run into issues, and you probably will, let us know so that we can fix them for the release.

Have fun everyone!

Some of you may not know that Game Developers Conference is happening now, and we are super excited about it! The XNA GS team is making two very very cool announcements: Zune is a new platform for game development and the ability to publish your games online for consumption through Xbox Live marketplace! This is so exciting, I am lost for words! Let me try though. Let me walk you through the two major announcements.

Zune

We have been working for a while on getting the Zune music player as a supported platform for XNA GS. Actually, if you remember from reading Yuichi Ito’s interview, this is the “secret” stuff he’s been working on for a while now! This will allow you guys to write your own games using the familiar XNA Framework and run them on a Zune device. All Zune devices are supported, old and new. You can read the FAQ that was posted in the forums about it. But I can tell you that I have used it (got it working on my Zune) and it is awesome! I was truly impressed by the work that was done so far, and it’s not even done!

Community Publishing

Ah… you’ve been asking for this since we released the first betas of XNA GS: “Can we publish our games on Xbox Live???”. Finally we have an answer that is good! Soon you will be able to upload a game you’ve written to the new http://creators.xna.com site (still in development but already looks HAWT!) and once it’s “approved”, people are going to be able to download it on their Xboxes through Xbox Live market place! So start making those games!!!! There are a lot of details regarding the publishing system that I am sure we’ll talk about more in the coming months. But trust me, this is very cool stuff. The guys working on this feature are incredibly cool and good at what they do.

XNA Games for download!

Yep, for a short while you are able to download 8 games that were built by XNA GS on Live Marketplace! Samurai Dishwasher is one of them! Go check out what people have done using XNA GS and have fun playing them. They are really cool games.

Now go have fun and I’ll get back to getting my lazy butt to continue my game series. I got some nice posts coming up… I just need to write them ;)

I am very excited to share the news about XNA Game Studio 2.0 having been released! You can grab your copy from here. Ok, fine, my post is a few days late (XNA Game Studio 2.0 was released last Thursday 13th Dec), but I have an excuse! I got on an airplane heading back home to Egypt to visit my family. I am in Egypt now and just barely got over the jet lag and the inital storm of “hey! nice to see you!!”. So what’s new??

Here’s a quick list of what’s new in this awesome version:

• Networking Support
• Expanded Support for Visual Studio 2005 Products (that means Visual Studio 2005 Pro and up, an no, no support for Visual Studio 2008)
• XNA Game Studio Device Center and Easier Xbox 360 Connectivity
• Cross-Platform Game Project Converter
• Updated Game Project Format
• Integrated Game Content Projects
• XNA Game Studio Package Utility
• Updated Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT)
• Parameterized Processors
• …and more! Have a look at the “What’s new” page in the docs for the full list of changes.

All my tutorials have been done using XNA Game Studio 2.0. So it’s a good idea to upgrade to that version if you haven’t by now.

Have fun! I will get to writing my next tutorial very soon. Just gotta get to feeding my camel first.

We are very proud to finally manage to get the beta bits of XNA Game Studio 2.0 in your hands! We are extremely excited with this version. Some of the new features include:

Visual Studio 2005 Pro and up support (as well as Express of course)

Networking! You can write games that use Xbox Live on Windows and Xbox! This feature simply ROCKS!

Content is now a project of its own vs mixed in with your other source files.

Ability to automatically convert a Windows project to a Xbox one with one click

Parameterized Processors are here! Supported by the Visual Studio IDE

No more device lost/reset in the framework. We handle it for you!

And many many more features!

Go get it! Report bugs as you find them of course.

So…we’re nearing the time to release Beta 2 of the XNA Game Studio product. The framework has gone through some more cleanups and is much better organized than it was in beta 1. The new component for the beta 2 is the Content Pipeline. The sweetness that is the content pipeline is something that must be experienced.

What is the content pipeline you say? Let me tell you! The Content Pipeline (CP) is the component that takes care of bringing game assets such as 3D models, textures, effects, etc to your game in a very simple manner. A typical usage scenario for the CP is creating some model in say 3D Max or Maya or whatever, export the model to Direct X File format (.x) or Autodesk FBX (.fbx). Add the file to your project in Visual Studio, add something like 4-5 lines of code, hit F5 and voila…model rendered on screen. Few more lines of code and you can use the game pad, mouse or keyboard to move the model around. You can do the same for textures, effects, sounds, etc.

Stay tuned for more info about the CP specially once the beta 2 is out. That thing is awesome!