I first interacted with XNA a few years ago when it had support for both PC and Xbox developing. Now i see that the directions of development are Xbox and Windows Phone. Is the PC part gone or is it automatically included into the Xbox development. We want to develop a game for PC only. Do I have enough support for it or the newest version of XNA shut it down?
- XNA is not supported in Windows 8 metro mode and it definitely looks like Microsoft is in the process of sunsetting it.BeRecursive– BeRecursive2012-10-15 13:35:13 +00:00Commented Oct 15, 2012 at 13:35
Add a comment |
2 Answers
If you are looking to develop for Windows 8 also, then I would suggest looking into the MonoGame project. Here is a snippet from their website:
MonoGame is an Open Source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework. Our goal is to allow XNA developers on Xbox 360, Windows & Windows Phone to port their games to the iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 8 Metro. PlayStation Mobile development is currently in progress.
The develop3d branch is the branch you would want to look into. It's still in dev, but there have been quite a few games that use it.
As the above stated, Microsoft has been pretty tight lipped about the future of XNA. Here is a link to a article series about porting XNA to monogame
Comments
The Windows Phone stuff got split off from the Xbox 360 stuff, due to Windows 8 and particularly Windows Phone 8 coming. In the process, Microsoft made a real mess of the create.msdn.com website.
The PC stuff (and some of the WP7 stuff) for XNA is still in with the Xbox stuff.
The latest version of XNA is 4.0. It still "works". I'm making a PC game using it. On the PC you can basically think of it as a really nice C# wrapper for DirectX 9 (plus a content pipeline). It works on the Desktop in Windows 8, but not in the new Metro-style UI.
Microsoft have been showing very, very little love for XNA since it started to show off Windows 8. They have said precisely nothing about the future of XNA. Maybe there will be a new version for the next Xbox. Or maybe 4.0 will be the last version. I don't think anyone outside Microsoft knows.
