XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP) now available!

The XNA Community Games Platform team has delivered on their promise to enable game development for Zune devices with the release of the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP). Some key features that are available in this release:

· Create and deploy 2D games for all Zune v1 and v2 devices

· Ability to support local ad-hoc wireless play with multiple Zunes.

· Discoverability/access to user’s music – allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations

· Improved sound effect API (drop sound files directly into the content pipeline).

· Either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition are required to install and run the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP

 

Limitations:

· Please note this current CTP does not enable Xbox 360 game development. Only Windows and Zune are supported in this CTP. If you want to build and deploy games for the Xbox 360, you must continue using XNA Game Studio 2.0 for now.

· Visual Studio 2005 SKUs are not supported with XNA Game Studio 3.0 and beyond. However, you do not need to uninstall Visual Studio 2005 or XNA Game Studio 2.0, as those products will work side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP.