Links to GDC 2009 XNA Game Studio Developer Day session content
The PowerPoint slides and the audio recordings for the sessions that were presented at the XNA Game Studio Developer Day at GDC 2009 are now available for download. Here are links to the download pages and brief descriptions of each session as they are described on the download pages:
XNA Game Studio Program Overview
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.
Analyzing Performance Shortfalls in XNA Game Studio Titles
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.
PIX and XNA Game Studio: Diagnosing Performance Problems
For years, professional game developers using the DirectX and Xbox 360 Software Development Kits have enjoyed the finest purpose-built performance analysis tools ever created for game development. The good news for game XNA Game Studio developers is that these same tools can be used to enhance their titles using Windows and the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions. This presentation will explore how to use PIX for Windows and PIX for Xbox 360 to profile and interpret performance issues in XNA Game Studio titles.
Faster: How to Improve XNA Game Studio Title Performance
XNA Game Studio provides access to the powerful Xbox 360 console, with multiple CPUs, a complex GPU, and plenty of memory and storage space. Despite all of this power, your title may run slower than expected. This talk will examine several common causes of performance problems and how to address each of them.
Networking, Traffic Jams, and Schrodinger’s Cat
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).
XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions, Certification, and You
The Holy Grail of XNA Game Studio game development is cost savings and shorter development times over that of large-budget native titles. A significant source of development cost for small developers can come from the time and effort necessary to polish a title for certification and release. This talk will show how the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions reduce the time necessary to deliver a certifiable, polished title for mainstream release.