Earlier this week, we released updated versions of the existing XNA Game Studio starter kits on the Creators Club web site that will install and work with XNA Game Studio 3.0.  To go along with that, we have also released some new and updated samples and a standalone version of the Spacewar starter kit for XNA Game Studio 3.0.

New XNA Game Studio 3.0 samples

We released 3 new samples that were created by Shawn Hargreaves to demonstrate new features in XNA Game Studio 3.0 and to better illustrate some of the best practices that will help you add polish to your games for publication on Xbox LIVE Community Games.  Here is some info about the new samples:

1. Invites - this sample builds on the peer-to-peer networking sample to demonstrate how to use the new invites feature in a game created with XNA Game Studio 3.0
2. Safe Area - this sample demonstrates how to make your game display correctly on a wide range of televisions; this is important so your game will look good on standard and wide-screen TVs of various sizes
3. Localization - this sample demonstrates how to create a multi-lingual game that uses .NET resource files to store locale-specific information and dynamically load the appropriate resources at runtime depending on the user's system settings

Updated samples

We also released updated versions of the following samples to better illustrate community game best practices and new XNA Game Studio 3.0 features:

• Game state management - this sample now includes proper tracking of what controller the player is using, and it pauses game play if the controller gets disconnected
• Network game state management - this sample now includes information about the new invites and trial mode features in XNA Game Studio 3.0

Spacewar starter kit

In addition, we released a standalone XNA Game Studio 3.0 version of the Spacewar starter kit (previously available as a part of the XNA Game Studio installation process, but replaced in 3.0 by the Platformer starter kit).

Converting existing 2.0 samples to 3.0

Most of the samples currently available on the Creators Club site are still only available in XNA Game Studio 2.0 versions.  However, they can easily be converted to work with XNA Game Studio 3.0 (and you do not need to have VS 2005 or XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed to convert the samples).  Here are steps you can use to accomplish this conversion:

1. Download the sample .zip file and extract the contents to a folder on your computer
2. Open Visual Studio 2008 or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
3. Click on the File menu and choose Open | Project/Solution... (in VS 2008) or Open Project... (in VC# 2008 Express)
4. Browse to the .csproj for the sample that you downloaded - this will cause the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard to appear
5. Step through the wizard UI to upgrade the project - as long as you have XNA Game Studio 3.0 installed along with VS 2008, the conversion wizard will upgrade the XNA Framework-specific information in the project files in addition to performing the general C# project upgrade steps provided by Visual Studio
6. After the conversion process completes, save the project, then build and run it in VS 2008 + XNA Game Studio 3.0

There is also a set of unofficial XNA Game Studio 3.0 samples that a member of the community converted from 2.0 to 3.0 using steps like the ones listed above and then re-zipped and posted for download.  You can find link to these unofficial samples in this blog post.  This link mentions the XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta, but there are not any differences in the Visual Studio project file format between the beta and the final release of XNA Game Studio 3.0, so these samples should also work in the final release of 3.0 and not just in the beta.

<update date="11/15/2008"> Added a link to a download location for unofficial 3.0 versions of the XNA Game Studio samples. </update>