Incoming XNA GSE Update

[Chr0n1x]

Announced on the XNA Team Blog recently, XNA is gonna get an update!

Michael Klucher
Program Manager ? XNA Community Game Platform Team

In April of this year you?ll be able to download an update to XNA Game Studio Express, this release mainly focuses fixing your requests and issues that you?ve filed through the Microsoft Connect site(yes, we really do read and respond to your bugs and feedback as best we can). So what are some of the improvements in this release? Let?s take a look through each feature area.

XNA Game Studio Express
Windows Vista is now fully supported
You can now add icons to XNA Game Studio Express Games.
Incrementally deployment of Xbox 360 projects now works for all your projects (not just the last one loaded)

XNA Framework
Added Bitmap based font support
Added XACT 3D Audio support
Improvements and additions to the Math framework API?s
BasicEffect now supports per-pixel lighting
Many more changes based on your feedback!

XNA Framework Content Pipeline
Added support for Volume Textures (Texture3D)
Content builds can now be canceled
Support for ?clean? builds
Added the ability to read vertex and index buffer information from Model types
Many more changes based on your feedback!

XNA Game Launcher (Xbox 360)
Game thumbnails are now displayed for your games
Improved connection-key connectivity experience between the Xbox 360 and the PC
The ability to test and diagnose the connection between the Xbox 360 and the PC
I hope that some of the changes called out above are something that you?re looking forward too. Funny, there seems to be something I?m missing from the list... oh yeah...

Developer sharing of packaged XNA Game Studio Express Games
Users can now package their binary games into a single file to share with other users of XNA Game Studio Express.
These files can be emailed or hosted on websites like any other files.
To run a game double click a file and it will unpack to your Windows based PC or Xbox 360 console, it?s that easy!
That was it! :-) Throughout the week of GDC and into next week we?ll be expanding on this list to give you information and ?sneak peeks? at some of the new functionality to this update of XNA Game Studio Express. We hope that this starts to build in the direction that you want to see and is considered by us to be a small step towards our goals future visions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2007/03/08/announcing-the-xna-game-studio-express-update.aspx


----

Update Released!
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937795.aspx

[EclipsE]

I can't wait! And I hope they will release another starter pack... 

[Chr0n1x]

They will be releasing a whole bunch of them via creators.xna.com, so I don't think they will include them in the update.

[DaphydTheBard]

This is very good news....some stuff in there that should have been in the initial release!

No mention of supoprt for animated meshes, though.

[Chr0n1x]

Hmm, well they've already provided a sample on how to do simple and skeleton animation on the Creators Club website.
[Hint] The Skeleton anims are in the skinning sample.

[h4rdc0m]

I'm still waiting for standard 3D model animations though.

[Tiago]

well, its April..... where is my update? i want it, want it, want it now