XNA Essentials

XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed Code updated to Run under Windows 10 (and HoloLens)

I’ve gone through the first pass of updating the code in the book. This took quite a bit of time. Some of the chapters are still a little wonky as I’ve ran out of time. But I wanted to get what I have done out into the public in case it was beneficial to anyone. I never really thought I’d update the code for the XNA Game Studio 3.0 Unleashed book. There were a lot of breaking changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0 and I just didn’t have the time to do it.

However, with my HoloLens being ordered, and hearing Tom Spilman on .NET Rocks last week (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1283), I decided to see what it would take to upgrade. It was surprisingly simple to get quite a few chapters converted and upgraded. Other chapters were just not attempted (like Networking stuff that isn’t directly in MonoGame [they expect you to use other libraries]). Others had to be commented out to work (like the GameServices stuff to bring up the Xbox Guide, etc.)

Still, the overall conversion project was a success. There a couple of rough edges, but now anyone can fork it and do what they'd like with it. Feel free to send a pull request, if you smooth out a rough edge. Try to keep with the original intent with the code as much as possible.

Go ahead and grab the code from GitHub:

https://github.com/kewlniss/XNAUnleashed

The Table of Contents for the book this code goes with can be found at http://xnaessentials.com/unleashed

The XNA Team made the announcement that XNA Game Studio 2.0 has been released.  The Net Rumble starter kit is a good place to see the most anticipated added feature of networking in place.

Some tips if you try to upgrade any of your 1.0 code to 2.0:

1. Make sure you have the Project Upgrade Wizard installed.

2. If you have sound in your project, you will want to open the project with the new XACT tool and then save it under the newer version.

3. If you use Render Targets you should read this local help page.

4. This doesn't require immediate change, but the LoadGraphicsContent and UnloadGraphicsContent methods are now obsolete.  LoadContent and UnloadContent should be used instead.  Shawn has an excellent post about this.

In general, read this local help page (available after installing XNA Game Studio 2.0).

Happy Coding!

-Chad