Latest XNA Game Studio CTP adds support for Zune games

The next phase in Microsoft's efforts to scale games across Windows to a certain portable device, begins this week with the introduction of a preview of the next XNA Game Studio. But as we discovered, it could use some help.

Since its introduction almost two years ago, Microsoft's Zune has provoked industry observers to wonder whether the company would be inspired to follow up with a portable game system, a la Sony's PlayStation Portable, or whether the Zune would actually become its handheld game system. Today the company took one big step in the direction of the latter, by unveiling a Community Technology Preview of its XNA Game Studio development environment that adds the Zune to its supported native platforms of Windows and Xbox 360.

"This feature gives you access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience," wrote XNA community program manager David Weller in a blog post to the XNA Team blog yesterday.

BetaNews checked out this new integration with the latest CTP. We learned that integration relies upon developers to have the Zune client software already installed, in order to create a link to Zune through the new XNA Game Studio Device Center. The device's firmware must be upgraded to version 2.5 first.

Our initial tests revealed a few quirks with this CTP. We used a fresh distribution of Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition as the centerpiece for our Game Studio installation, since it's said to require either that or Visual C# Express. But what we discovered was that, despite the presence of VS 2008 and the absence of Visual C# Express, the CTP was expecting to find the latter. As a result, the critical project templates were not installed.

How bad of a problem is that? Well, you need the project templates to be able to learn how to use Game Studio if you've never used it before -- especially the Spacewar template, which Microsoft has used as an example for over two years. Since the Game Studio 2.0 project templates are incompatible with the 3.0 version templates -- a fact we found out for ourselves the hard way -- you end up actually not being able to use any of the sample work to get you started.

You can, however, start off with a blank project. But the tutorials that come with Game Studio are all based on the notion that you have the sample templates; and even though they're written as though you may have the full, commercial Standard Edition, if you can't load the sample templates, you're virtually out in the woods by yourself -- which is not the most fun game, if you think about it.

For now, BetaNews advises CTP testers to use a Virtual PC machine or other virtual Windows box, and install Visual C# Express -- the free edition -- there. If you build any projects you want to be able to use later, the .SLN project files should be portable.