Today the XNA Framework 4.0 has been announced, with a bunch of juicy details and hints.
The press release on the creators club website has some details, but is somewhat misleading. Many people (myself included) took their wording to mean xna 4.0 was exclusively for Windows Phone 7. Though this has been cleared up by Shawn Hargreaves. (They might want to update the press release, its very misleading)
The feature list we know of so far (from Shawn Hargreaves):
- New platform
- Windows Phone 7 Series
- New features
- Integrates with Visual Studio 2010
- Dynamic audio output
- Microphone input
- BasicEffect has four new siblings
- SkinnedEffect
- EnvironmentMapEffect
- DualTextureEffect
- AlphaTestEffect
- Improved portability and usability
- Collapsed graphics caps into just two profile levels: Reach and HiDef
- Many graphics API improvements
- This involves some breaking API changes
- Split Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll into several assemblies, to make it more obvious which pieces are available on each platform
These are some pretty cool features! WP7 support is cool too, but I’m still a little skeptical about how successful its going to be, and if I’ll even want to get one. We’ll have to wait and see.
The Dynamic Audio support does include access to the sound buffers themselves, which is something I’ve been wanting since the beginning of the xna framework. The microphone support is for all platforms which is really, really cool!
Within the next few weeks more information should be released, and more importantly the press release says we might not have to wait very long for the update (“Sometime within the next month”). Though that’s not specific whether its a beta or the actual update. I’ll keep posting new stuff as it comes in, so stay tuned!
This is my first visit here, but I will be back soon, because I really like the way you are writing, it is so simple and honest