Describes new features and changes in Microsoft XNA Game Studio.
New Framework Features
Avatars
Avatars are three-dimensional animated characters. The Xbox Dashboard uses avatars to represent gamers who are signed in to the local console, and players in the gamers' friends lists and LIVE Party chats. Titles can also use avatars in games, both to represent gamers and to represent other characters in the game.
Concepts
- Programming with Avatars
-
Discusses the support for avatars in XNA Game Studio applications targeting the Xbox 360
console.
Tasks
Reference
- AvatarAnimation
- Provides methods and properties for animating an avatar using standard animations (for example, celebrate).
- AvatarDescription
- Provides access to the methods and properties of the description data for an avatar.
- AvatarExpression
- Contains the various components of the avatar's face, such as the left and right eyebrows.
- AvatarRenderer
- Provides properties and methods for rendering a standard avatar.
- SignedInGamer.AvatarChanged
- Occurs when a gamer's avatar changes.
- SignedInGamer.Avatar
- Description data for the avatar that represents the gamer.
- AvatarAnimationPreset
- Defines standard animations for avatars.
- AvatarBone
- Defines a list of the useful bones of the avatar model.
- AvatarEyebrow
- Defines the standard animation textures for an avatar's eyebrows.
- AvatarEye
- Defines the standard animation textures for an avatar's eyes.
- AvatarMouth
- Defines the standard animation textures for an avatar's mouth.
Xbox LIVE Party
Xbox LIVE Party enables 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. It does not matter what each gamer is doing on his or her Xbox 360 at the time—playing games, watching videos, listening to music, or browsing the Marketplace. LIVE Party chat keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches. Furthermore, LIVE Party chat provides easy and quick ways for gamers to get into multiplayer games together.
Tasks
Reference
Video
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
Tasks
Reference
Audio Enhancements
This version of XNA Game Studio 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.
Tasks
Content Pipeline Enhancements
This changes the semantics of the Content Pipeline, making it much easier to add custom types.
Reference
New Conceptual Content
Changes to the Development Environment and Tools
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.
Tasks
XACT Update
XNA Game Studio 3.1 includes support for XACT3. XACT 3 has a number of new features, including the following.
Ability to enable a filter on every track.
XACT3 now exposes a filter on every track, letting the sound designer set the filter type and parameters (filter width and the cutoff/center frequency). The filter can be set directly on a track or it can be attached to an RPC. Sound designers either can set specific filter parameters or they can specify a range. When setting a range, they can select a random value for the parameter each time the track is played.
Support for the xWMA compression format.
XACT3 now supports xWMA decoding in software on both Xbox 360 and Windows. xWMA uses the WMA bitstream format in a lightweight wrapper, and it can provide 1.5–2× the compression compared with XMA at similar quality. xWMA is very useful for types of content, such as dialog or music, for which you can afford a small CPU hit to achieve much greater compression. A quality setting similar to XMA's allows you to increase or decrease compression to adjust sound performance.
Changes to the XNA Framework API
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.Pipeline.Serialization.Compiler
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Net
Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Storage