New Game Dev Software for XBOX Live Brings Powerful New Features

Even as the dust begins to settle from the 2009 E3 conference in Los Angeles, new announcements are emerging from Microsoft that amaze and astound.  Beyond the hands-free motion capturing Natal technology and the news that Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm will all soon be integrated directly into the Xbox Live experience, independent game designers will now have some powerful new features that will allow them to remain competitive in developing new games for the Xbox Live Community games marketplace.

Some of the most exciting features of the new XNA Game Studio software include:

Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.

Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.

Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:

• Full screen video playback
• Video playback to simple textures in game
• Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
• Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
• Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
• Play back multiple video streams at the same time

To see the complete list of new features available in XNA Game Studio 3.1 visit the official announcement site.

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