The up-n-coming XNA beta update

Simon (darkside) Jackson
ramblings xna

From the archive

This post was written in 2006. Technology has moved on a fair bit since then, so some of the tools, links and advice here may well be out of date. Treat it as a piece of history rather than a current guide.

For most of you in the know the XNA framework and XNA Game Studio Express are going to get a refresh to beta 2, thanks to Dave “LetsKillDave” Weller (still gotta love his alias), he has given an example of the changes to a sample tutorial, in this case Kurt Jagers 2D Tile game tutorial (I happen to like this one a lot)

So if any of you are considering upgrading to the next Beta (I am since some of the changes now include the content pipeline and I’d rather get these changes in now, fairly early into my project), I would suggest reading over Dave’s little intro and for more Beta 2 Detail head over to theZbuffer, to get zMans details from the Code camp and some more examples of changes.

Link to Let’s Kill Dave! : Migrating an XNA Application from Beta 1 to Beta 2

In my own game world, things finally have started to progress a bit, a good warning for any other aspiring beginners is this

“If you’re thinking of having a project that is moddable or has Loadable/Editable levels (ie not just stored in-game), start thinking about your editor first and what you need to store save”

The amount of refactoring and rework I’ve done once I started doing the map editor, is well, exhausting and a good lesson to learn, lol. (whimper) But one I’m glad to have come through, the upside is now that the editor is well under way, the actual game mechanics are a lot easier to implement.

PS

If you read to the end Dave is definitely hinting at a sooner rather than later release date, read between the lines and he seems to be hinting (by the end of the week), whoohoo is all I can say, roll on the content pipeline.