XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta – Released with 64-Bit Support
Posted by Dan Rigsby on September 19th, 2008
XNA Game Studio is Microsoft’s cross platform game development extensions for Visual Studio and .Net. With it you can target games and applications for either Windows, Xbox 360, or Zune (running >= the 3.0 firmware).
A few months back I blogged about the release of the CTP of XNA Game Studio 3.0 and about how there was no 64-bit OS support. Well, a couple of days ago, Microsoft released the first Beta of the Studio. This release was heavily overshadowed by the release of the Zune 3.0 software and firmware. However, I am pleased to find that there is finally 64-bit support, and I have it up and running. This Beta release requires Visual Studio 2008 (2005 is no longer supported). If you don’t have Visual Studio, but want to try out XNA Game Studio, you can always download Visual C# 2008 Express (which is free) and install XNA Game Studio on it. The only language supported is still C#.
Once you have XNA Game Studio installed, you can start creating projects by using one of the predefined templates:
Notice that there are 2 different templates for each of the 3 target project types (Windows, XBox 360, and Zune). When a project is created, each target platform project has a different Icon:
This makes it a bit easier to tell what a project is targeted for. You could also look for the XnaPlatform node in the xml for the .csconfig file:
<XnaPlatform>Zune</XnaPlatform>
The 3 possible values are “Zune”, “Xbox 360”, and “Windows”.
You can download XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta here: http://creators.xna.com/en-us/3.0beta_mainpage
If you are interested in doing Zune work, the game “Alien Game”, which was introduced in the CTP, is back for the Beta. You can download it here: http://creators.xna.com/downloads/?id=199 and start tweeking it.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Hey Dan,
I’ve been having trouble depolying the new Alien Game to my Zune for XNA Beta. I have a Vista 32 bit, my Zune is updated to the latest firmware 3.0 and my XNA game studio is updated to Beta. I’ve tried every tutorial under the sun to try to deploy these games (including yours, no offense) and nothing seems to work. You appear to have the best control of Vista so I’m turning to you in desperation (If there exists such a desperation to put games on a Zune). Any suggestions?
September 19th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I’ll put together a new post with a step-by-step to installing Alien Game. I’ll have it up later tonight.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
[...] Larry Clarkin « XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta – Released with 64-Bit Support [...]
September 20th, 2008 at 9:16 am
[...] XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta – Released with 64-bit Support and Installing Alien Game on a Zune Using XNA Game Studio (Dan Rigsby) [...]
September 20th, 2008 at 10:23 am
I’m using 64-bit Vista and XNA doesn’t seem to want to find my zune. It tells me I don’t have the software installed, yet I do.
September 20th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
You might want to double check the firmware of your Zune. it needs to be 3.0. Follow the steps in the commments of this post to install ZUne software on 64-bit: http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/16/zune-30-and-windows-server-2008-64-bit/#comment-1113