Microsoft XNA Developer Presentations

Your XNA Game Studio game doesn’t run as well as you expected, and you have no idea why.  The first step towards fixing your title is to first understand your title: how it allocates memory, and how it uses the CPU and GPU.  This talk demonstrates several of the tools and techniques available to XNA Game Studio developers to analyze their title’s performance shortfalls.

The XNA Framework networking API makes it easy to join a session and exchange data packets. But what exactly should you put in those packets? This talk explains how to overcome the challenges posed by limited bandwidth (if you send too much data, or fail to properly compress it, your game could end up even slower than my morning commute) and delivery latency (when packets arrive late, you must use prediction algorithms to smooth things out, creating a strange quantum world where each object has more than one state being simulated in parallel).

The XNA Platform and Tools team has been hard at work delivering updates to PIX for both Xbox 360 and Windows. This session brings you up to speed on the new features and improvements made to this critical toolset for performance investigation and analysis of your title.

You’ve got gigabytes of juicy game content --- now where are you going to put it all?  Preparing game content packages will soon become easier and more flexible due to new tools arriving in the XDK.  We will present the available means of preparing your data: for emulation during development and testing, for placement on optical disc, and for play from hard drive.  Through engagement with many real-world titles, we have developed a list of best practices for content management and production.  This talk will discuss how to fit data into limited disc space and how to physically arrange data for optimal user experience.

XNA Game Studio has come a long way from XNA Game Studio Express 1.0.  Learn about the new features in XNA Game Studio 3.0 and how to publish your game with the XNA Community Games publishing program.  We are also unveiling the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions, a new SDK that enables Xbox LIVE Arcade and retail game development with the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360.