XNA Spacewar Starter Kit Webcast and other XNA Multimedia Content

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Christina Storm
Group Program Manager - XNA Team

 

Frank Savage, development manager of the XNA Game Studio team, presented a webcast on September 26, during which he introduced the XNA Game Studio Express starter kit “Spacewar”. The webcast is almost one hour long. As usual, you can view the recorded webcast as a streaming video or download it for offline viewing. Click here to connect to this webcast. Frank itemizes changes to this starter kit since its initial release as part of our beta download, so you know what’s coming.

If you are wondering why we chose the format of starter kits to provide sample code projects for our customers, it’s simply because we are following the successful convention started by the Visual Studio product family. Starter kits came online with the Visual Studio 2005 releases. They are essentially enhanced project templates that can be shared with other members of the community. For the final release, we’ll have additional samples available for you.

Frank also mentions that there are many cool community sites out there that showcase great XNA samples and tutorials. They are easy to locate, and are a great source for additional content and ideas.

By the way, if it sounds like Frank has a lisp in the recording, I assure you, it’s the compression on the file! :-)

You might also want to check out the recorded presentations from Microsoft Gamefest 2006. You find the XNA sessions in the Developer Tools: XNA and Visual Studio Track. Unfortunately they posted the audio separate from each session’s PowerPoint slides, which means that you have to create your own presentation by clicking through the slides as you listen to the audio.  But it’s still great content to review.

Last comment for today: You may remember that our product unit manager, Boyd Multerer, kicked off this blog in August.  He was also interviewed by Ernie Booth from the Channel 9 crowd at Gamefest. Make sure to check out that video for more details on the team, thoughts on XNA and why we are so excited about our charter.

Ok, that’s it for today. Keep your comments and input coming, for example about the webcast and other content linked to in this entry. We’re looking at all of them and will keep you informed about our progress.

THANK YOU!