XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta Release On Its Way!

Michael Klucher
Program Manager – XNA Game Studio Team

On behalf of the XNA team I am excited to announce the upcoming availability of the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta. This is a significant milestone and represents the completion of all our features for XNA Game Studio 3.0! We’ll have much more information with the final release but here’s a quick glance at some of the key features and additions in the beta:

Zune

• Compatibility with the upcoming Zune 3.0 Firmware release. Please note that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP will no longer work once you have upgraded your Zune device to the 3.0 firmware.
• Improved deployment stability.
• Support for Zune deployment on Windows Vista x64 Systems!
• You can now use the Remote Performance Monitor for Zune games.

Xbox 360

• Xbox 360 project templates (You will not be able to develop on the Xbox 360 until our final release. We felt this was important to include so that you could get projects converted over and look at the system, even if you are not able to run the games, yet).
• Support for the Big Button Pad.

Framework & Visual Studio Features

• Enumerate and play back media on your Windows computer or Xbox 360.
• Simple sound effect support on Windows computers and Xbox 360.
• Support for Rich Presence (lets friends know what’s going on in your game).
• Support for Invites (ask your friends to join you in a multiplayer game) and Join Session In Progress (after you see what your friends are doing, you can join their current session with just a couple of button presses, even if that’s a different game to the one you are currently playing)
• Compress your content and save space with the new content compression features!
• ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows.
• Upgrade your project from XNA Game Studio 2.0 using the Project Upgrade Wizard!
• Take screen captures of your game running on Zune through the XNA Game Studio Device Center.
• Support for .NET language features like Linq
• Create multiple content projects and leverage cross project synchronization in Visual Studio.
• FBX importer improvements: read materials containing multiple textures, and export custom shader materials directly out of Max or Maya.

We hope that early next week you’ll give the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta a download and run it through its paces. As we mentioned above this beta will be very close to what our release looks like, so if you encounter ship stopping issues (crashes, hangs) please let us know through Microsoft Connect! We’ve paid close attention to your feedback and we’ve added many of the features you requested. If your feature didn’t make it in this release, don’t worry we’ve still got more to come! If you have ideas on ways we can be better share them with us through Microsoft Connect. There you can add or vote on feature suggestions that you would like to see.

We’ll post on this blog as soon as the download becomes available early next week!