XNA Game Studio Express Beta Now Available

d.3.l.t.r.3.3 writes "The long awaited XNA Game Studio Express public Beta is finally here. Despite some high claims by Microsoft, the Game Studio remains a code-only experience, with a more coherent and less fragmented feature set than the old DirectX 9 SDK. As I describe in this review, XNA has successfully streamlined many dull tasks of game development (helped a bit by the new game-supportive features of Windows Vista). It's also, unfortunately, kept too many frustrating pieces and bugs (especially when it comes to cross platform input handling and audio) to be successfully considered a real multi-platform game developing tool."

Impressions

[Corngood]

This is a copy of a post I made on evil avatar. I figure people here might actually care. :)

I found it a little bit disappointing so far (I know it's a beta).

The biggest problem is that there is no content pipeline. Apparently this was due to be included, but got delayed until the next version. This would be less of a problem if they still had support for D3DX meshes, but they've removed all that stuff without replacing it. Since the content tools are coming soon (hopefully) I'm really not inclined to build my own temporary pipeline, and I seriously doubt people who are new to game programming want to mess about making pipeline tools when the whole point of this thing is to let them focus on making games.

You should be able to fire up the spacewar example and easily replace the ships with some .x files you've created and exported with an exporter provided with XNA (or using .fbx, which they plan to support). As it stands, the models are all in an undocumented bespoke format, for which there are no tools, so you'd have to follow the loading code and write your own converter, or write a bunch of code to support another format.

The documentation references DxTex and XACT, tools you need for all but simple textures, and for any kind of audio respectively, but they aren't included (as far as I can tell), so to get them, you need to get the full DirectX SDK as well. I can see DxTex being replaced by the content pipeline, but why isn't XACT included? Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I saw this thing as being an alternative to the full SDK, not complementary to it.

They call it 'XNA Game Studio', so I was expecting some IDE integration, with GPU debugging, or PIX integration, or anything DirectX related. Unfortunately it just seems to have added some new project wizards, and that's it.

The framework is pretty much the same as previous versions of Managed DirectX, with a whole lot of stuff ripped out, some new helper classes, and the rest cleaned up nicely.

I'm still excited about the XNA Framework and XNA GSE, and I can't fault the direction they are taking with this stuff. My main problem is that there's barely anything here that you can't do just as well with the old version of managed DirectX and the same copy of VC#, and with that you can at least use the .x stuff to get some content in your game. Anyway, I look forward to checking out the next release, especially the content pipeline, which sounds very cool from what I've read about it.