Any roadmap for GameStudio 4.0?
-E
Well it seems like its that time of year again. XNA Updates. :)
XNA Game Studio 4.0 was announced and is expected next month.
some of the highlights are:
Click here to read the FAQ.
I'm currently wondering how will this effect the SunBurn Community.
JohnK, have you already started making Integration plans with XNA Game Studio 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 for the next release of SunBurn?I know It's still early, but I am just was wondering about everyone thought on XNA Game Studio 4.0.
Hi guys,
Excellent questions, actually we're interested in getting some community feedback on the matter.
(update: SunBurn 1.3.2 is already out and running on XNA 3.1, so developers can use SunBurn 1.3 and launch games at their earliest convenience :)
As you guys probably remember XNA 3.0 was in beta / CTP for a looong time (5 months). Obviously we want to give you access to the latest and greatest XNA features as soon as possible, however if the XNA 4.0 release is similar it might mean your games are running on a beta version of XNA for a fairly long period of time. Or that we need to keep SunBurn 1.3 in beta until XNA 4.0 launches and (in the meantime) SunBurn 1.2.x becomes the official recommended release for 100% stability.
We weren't planning on keeping SunBurn 1.3 in beta for long, however it's certainly an option if XNA 4.0 support is preferred.
Btw: I didn't mention rushing SunBurn 1.3 out to make way for a 1.4 / XNA 4.0 release, because at this point in the release schedule it's probably not a great idea.
One huge factor is whether or not XNA Connect will be updated with the CTP (I'm guessing it won't be), if not that means XBLIG games won't be able to ship using XNA 4.0 until the final release.
Thoughts?
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I definitely agree with that last point and I think that's what will make the difference. It might be nice to have a version to play with that is 4.0 supported but I would much rather prefer the main release available to us to be the one that we can ship with until 4.0 is fully released and allows game submissions with it.
I think it may be a few months before we can publish to XBLIG with XNA 4.0, similar to XNA 3.0 on its first released.I agree with Raphael, I think it would be nice to have a main release to work with until 4.0
1.3 seems stable enough to work with atm (we did Avatar Land using it), so what I would prefer is to continue being able to use 1.3 and then have a whole new SunBurn release for 4.0 whenever it's ready, instead of having 1.3 become the 4.0 version of SunBurn.
Basically, I'm fine with whatever allows us to continue using 1.3 and then switch over to 1.x whenever XNA 4.0 comes out and is usable... Ideally with a beta version of the new SunBurn shortly after 4.0 comes out. :)
I personnally think you already gain a lot of experience and learned how to use Xna 3.1 and you already decided to broke the 1.2 API so I would advice you to build on solid knowledge and stabilize the 1.3 API design patterns before allowing development resources to a 4.0 compatible SunBurn Engine.
Once you'll have a solid foundation for the 1.3 API, making the code changes internally without affecting your end users to comply with the Xna 4.0 breaking changes should be fast enough to bring a Beta a few weeks after its release.
Once these compatibility issues will be solved, you'll then be able to consider improvements and additional features to SunBurn Engine using the latest Xna.
At the end, it's your call but that would at least avoid me some debugging misunderstandings if I got to learn SunBurn and the newsest Xna versions. ;)
Philippe
i haven't coded with sunburn for a few months. i have just kept to XNA3.1 on its' own.
reason being is that, i knew that there would/will be issues when xna4 comes out, and these changes will be reflected in the new releases of sunburn.
all my code is XNA & FX, at the moment. i am waiting for a more stable 1.3x/1.4, with a more resolute API, before porting.
I do not want to be stuck in a catch-22 situation, where i am in the middle of a port and find i have to start over for a newer release.
:-)
edit: my models are awesome now though (hehe)
sorry if the answer to this question isn't already obvious... will I need to pay for an upgrade if I purchase sunburn now and want support for XNA 4.0 when it's released?
No.
All Sunburn versions work with all versons of XNA. The currently released versions (1.2.6 & 1.3.1) work on XNA3.1 and below.
1.2.x is considered finished, and is the best way to get past peer-review with forward rendering techniques.
1.3.x is still considered a BETA, with enthusis on deferred rendering. It will work on XNA4 without any changes.
The changes in API between these two versions are slight, and easily overcome.
Changes, or should i say additions, to the XNA current platform are the extension of BasicEffect, etc... Since Sunburn will be handling rendering instead of BasicEffect, these changes are irrelevant (???).
So.... No matter which release of Sunburn you get, it will always work on any release of XNA.
As far as I know, Sunburn users do not pay for API upgrades.
SUNBURN IS AWESOME
Hi frooze,
The upgrade to XNA 4.0 is free for all licensees, you can get started with SunBurn today and continue using it well into the future. To date we've released ~18 updates for SunBurn, some with significant new features (like SunBurn's deferred rendering), but all free to SunBurn developers.
And like Dug mentioned we continue to provide access to older SunBurn versions, so you can upgrade at your convenience.
Let me know if this helps!
In France, we have an idiom that says that when you have no news, there's probably good news ;)
It's been a while since we didn't heard from the team about the close future of the engine and API and I wondered if there would be anything new you could share with us on what is coming and what are your plans for the coming months.
That would help us (or me at least) seeing how I should move on. The latest news about XNA 4 and their breaking changes being quite important changes for my developments (I have to rewrite 70% of the core of my game state management :( ).
And I wouldn't like to see that reproduced with the rendering side of my game ;)
Thanks
Hi Philippe,
Yup, lots of good news. :) Unfortunately nothing we can talk about just yet. ;)
Philippe Da Silva:The latest news about XNA 4 and their breaking changes being quite important changes for my developments (I have to rewrite 70% of the core of my game state management :( ).
Ouch! That's not good. :(
The XNA 4.0 graphics changes seem relatively minimal. Are there changes related to the XNA storage, guide, or similar areas causing problems for you?
Hi John,
Can't wait for these news ;)
As far as the XNA 4.0 graphics changes, my core application framework (I'm not using Xna Game structure as I dislike how it is built but it's just me :p) was by design quite (badly designed) heavily tied up to the way XNA graphic states are implemented since 1.0. With all those changes, I thought that I should take the opportunity to redevelop this framework so it is less dependent on the way things work inside XNA.
John, about the news you can't talk about for now, you shared previously with me that you were working on something similar to what I've done on LOD support for the SceneObject class and I wondered if you could tell if that would be made available soon?
If you can't give estimates, could you at least share if that's part of your plans for the next couple of months as I'm planning to invest a lot of time on it (the current code doesn't work perfectly when you move SceneObjects surely due to something related to the way WorldBoundingSphere and WorldBoundingBox are calculated) and I would like to avoid spending time on a feature that would make it quite soon ;)
Thanks by advance.
We're not working on LOD just yet, though we certainly could be working on it in a few months.
Right now we're focused on getting 1.3.2 and the new editor polished up and ready for launch. This will help make room for... more cool stuff. ;)
We did add some awesome new functionality to 1.3.2. Like the ability to add / remove meshes from SceneObjects on-the-fly - so you can construct custom objects in code (even procedurally) without having to derive from SceneObject. Also the ability to override mesh effects when creating SceneObjects from XNA Models. And a ton of stuff focused on streamlining SunBurn development even more.
Lots of cool stuff. :)