Book Review: XNA Game Studio 3.0

Having received a copy of Microsoft’s, Learn Programming Now! XNA Game Studio 3.0 (written by Rob Miles) I decided to try my hand at a book review. For all people who want to know how a game really works this is actually quite a good read. You do not have to be a programming genius to read this book, and it has been designed to provide a simple, yet fun learning experience.

Coming from a C++ (build everything yourself) background, I was not every enthusiastic about using XNA, thinking that it is just a dodgy cover to DirectX. But it is FAR from that, XNA is a brilliant tool, to build fun games quickly and easily.
The book is very much the same, it sets you up for a gentle ride into the XNA world, but before you know it you have fallen in love with a great programming tool. It is packed with detailed information describing everything you need to know to get started with XNA. From creating your first program, all the way up to multi-player networked games, there is even a bit of AI in there as well.

If you’re thinking that this is a code heavy book then you are quite wrong. Yes there is code on almost every second page, but Rob has only placed small snippets in so you don’t get lost in pages of black and white code. Every bit of code is explained very well, there were only a few times where I had to look back and think about what was explained.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised about how easy this book is to read, as I am no book worm at all. I cannot stand the dribble of university books, so this was a very comforting change. For anyone out there wanting to get into XNA programming, or just learning some of the trick on how to make games this is a great book.

Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 on Dreamspark!

In the words of Hubert J. Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!" – Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 are all now on Dreamspark, free to students! Expression Studio 3 brings some awesome improvements to.. well.. every product in it – Blend 3 + SketchFlow, Web + Super Preview, Encoder now has screencasting.

Expression Studio 3 Highlights

• Expression Encoder 3
• Improved H.264
• VBR Smooth Streaming
• Source CODECs
• Audio Enhancements.
• Performance
• Live Encoding
• Screen Capture
• Improved profile pallete
• Silverlight 3 Media Players
• New player skins
• API Enhancements
• Win7 Integration
• SDK "in the box"
• Expression Blend 3
• SketchFlow – Sketch WPF/Silverlight interactive prototypes.
• Photoshop and Illustrator support
• Styling Controls: Creating templates from artwork
• Styling Controls: Creating TextBox Templates from Artwork
• States: Improved Support for VSM
• Interactivity: Behaviors
• Working with and Generating Data
• Expression Web 3
• Super Preview – view side by side comparisons of your website in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7/8 and more
• Publish with SFTP/FTPS
• Improved Photoshop PSD support – import just the layers you want!
• Silverlight support – uses Expression Encoder 3 to encode (nearly) any video you want to Silverlight and embed on your site!
• TFS SC support
• Deep Zoom Composer support

XNA Game Studio 3.1 Highlights

• Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
• Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
• Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
  • Full screen video playback
  • Video playback to simple textures in game
  • Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
  • Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
  • Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
  • Play back multiple video streams at the same time
• Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
• Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add custom types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
• XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
• Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.