Who would have believed it - But Microsoft pulls one out of the bag yet again!

Simon (darkside) Jackson
xna

From the archive

This post was written in 2007. Technology has moved on a fair bit since then, so some of the tools, links and advice here may well be out of date.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.

Browsing on my blogs (as you do) I happily read around the XNA Teams blogs over the last few days (I’m working in India at the moment so do not have much time for it).

I return to my blog list a little later to find yet another post has jumped on the XNA Team blog.

WOW

Just when you thought you might have to wait another year for XNA GSE 2.0 for new fixes patches and enhancements to the XNA Framework, all the jazzy things we want to do that we have to do ourselves currently (Seen a lot of request and workarounds on the forum of late).

Lo and behold there is now going to be a patch to GSE in April and man what a fix and feature list, pretty much everything that’s been asked for on the connect site and a bit more (also a bit less as well, the truly hard things will just have to wait I suppose).

Get the full info here, in short the updates include:

XNA Game Studio Express

  • Windows Vista is now fully supported
  • You can now add icons to XNA Game Studio Express Games.
  • Incremental deployment of Xbox 360 projects now works for all your projects (not just the last one loaded)

XNA Framework

  • Added Bitmap based font support
  • Added XACT 3D Audio support
  • Improvements and additions to the Math framework API’s
  • BasicEffect now supports per-pixel lighting
  • Many more changes based on your feedback!

XNA Framework Content Pipeline

  • Added support for Volume Textures (Texture3D)
  • Content builds can now be canceled
  • Support for “clean” builds
  • Added the ability to read vertex and index buffer information from Model types
  • Many more changes based on your feedback!

XNA Game Launcher (Xbox 360)

  • Game thumbnails are now displayed for your games
  • Improved connection-key connectivity experience between the Xbox 360 and the PC
  • The ability to test and diagnose the connection between the Xbox 360 and the PC

Keep up the great work guys!!