XNA Game Studio 3.0 ‘technical preview’ made available

It looks like Microsoft‘s trying to increase the must-have factor for the pricey Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 suite, because the XNA Team has just come up with a VS 2008-only rendition of XNA Game Studio – upgraded to version 3.0 But there’s a lot of catches, and they aren’t pretty for the average, budget-conscious, and possibly still studying,  indie dev. Prepare to be blown away (the wrong way, probably) at the full story.

In the wake of Microsoft‘s Visual Studio 2008 launching comes XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP (or Community Technical Preview for the acronym-challenged), which is supposedly a sampler to what the 2008 IDE suite’s technology would have to offer in the way of XNA game development. Unfortunately, the CTP is only for 2008-grade Visual Studio development tools and nothing less.

The system requirements demand that either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition (with C# support installed) or the Visual C# 2008 Express Edition be installed prior to using XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP. Also it should be noted that further iterations of XNA Game Studio will no longer support dated VS 2005 development suites. Well, at least it’s Vista-worthy now.

Also, the CTP isn’t a complete version of the dev tool, as it doesn’t support Xbox 360 game development either. The current build of the CTP only caters to Zune and PC development. It is also limited to only 32-bit environments, so those swimming in seas of spacious RAM won’t get to ‘teeter totter’ with the new features that XNA Game Studio 3.0 touts.

Is it worth the migration? Maybe if Zune game development is your slice of pie, but right now, feel free to simply test the release – provided that you have the software and hardware to make it tick.