XNA Game Studio and the Fall Dashboard Update
Michael Klucher
Program Manager - XNA Community Game Platform
If you own an Xbox 360 console, hopefully you've caught news of the Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard Update from Major Nelson. I wanted to give XNA Creators Club members a look at how you'll work with XNA Creators Club content after the update and how using XNA Game Studio 2.0 will change as a result.
Goodbye "Demos and More"
When you get the update, you'll notice that the games blade has been completely redesigned. There's a new feature called the Games Library, which is the one-stop destination for all your game content on your Xbox 360 console—including XNA Game Studio Connect, and the XNA Game Launcher.
The Games Library uses the "Twist" interface to allow you to filter content based on it's type. While the twist category for XNA Creators Club is hidden by default if you have the XNA Game Launcher or XNA Game Studio Connect installed you'll be able to filter the list. For example here's what the games library looks like when I select it.
If I twist over to the XNA Creators Club twist you'll see that my arcade games have been filtered out.
New Integration for XNA Game Studio 2.0
As we mentioned in an earlier post XNA Game Studio Connect sits side by side with XNA Game Launcher. If you look at the All Games list you'll see them both listed.
The really big feature however, is that when you deploy a game using XNA Game Studio Connect it will appear in the Games Library just like any other game you've downloaded. To run the game you'll still need an XNA Creators Club Membership but you no longer have to launch XNA Game Studio Connect before you can browse and run your games!
Games deployed through XNA Game Launcher (version 1) will continue to exist only inside the XNA Game Launcher itself. As we mentioned earlier, you can deploy version 1 .ccgame files through XNA Game Studio Connect and they will show up in the Games Library just like any other version 2 game!
Our thanks go out to the Xbox LIVE Arcade team, because without their help we wouldn't have been able to offer this great feature. We hope you'll find it easier to get to and run all your games, including the games you've deployed yourself!