XNA Team Blog

Quote: * XNA Game Studio Express o Windows Vista is now fully supported o You can now add icons to XNA Game Studio Express Games. o Incrementally deployment of Xbox 360 projects now works for all your projects (not just the last one loaded) * XNA Framework o Added Bitmap based font support o Added XACT 3D Audio support o Improvements and additions to the Math framework API’s o BasicEffect now supports per-pixel lighting o Many more changes based on your feedback! * XNA Framework Content Pipeline o Added support for Volume Textures (Texture3D) o Content builds can now be canceled o Support for “clean” builds o Added the ability to read vertex and index buffer information from Model types o Many more changes based on your feedback! * XNA Game Launcher (Xbox 360) o Game thumbnails are now displayed for your games o Improved connection-key connectivity experience between the Xbox 360 and the PC o The ability to test and diagnose the connection between the Xbox 360 and the PC * Developer sharing of packaged XNA Game Studio Express Games o Users can now package their binary games into a single file to share with other users of XNA Game Studio Express. o These files can be emailed or hosted on websites like any other files. o To run a game double click a file and it will unpack to your Windows based PC or Xbox 360 console, it’s that easy!

Looks like we'll finally be getting 3D Audio [cool] The developer sharing also sounds really cool too.

Hot dang, this does sound good! 3D Audio and Font support. Woot! It mentions we can now "read vertex and index buffer information from Model types". It makes me wonder how this works.

Sounds like a great set of updates indeed [smile] The "read vertex and index buffer information from Model types" sounds like the ability to lock these buffers during runtime, as was missing from the current version of XNA iirc. Hopefully we can also write back this data as well... Official font support is also nice to have, though I had hoped they'd implement some vector based font solution. No complaints though, just friendly suggestions [wink]

In case anyone missed it, here's a preview of the font support.

I just stumbled across the GDC 2007 DirectX/XNA slides.