XNA Game Studio 3.0 Community Technical Preview Now Open

If you’re a game developer looking to mess around with development on Zune, today’s your lucky day. The XNA team announced today that they’ve released the first Community Technical Preview of Game Studio 3.0 (as promised) As the announcement reads, “This feature gives you access to the majority of the XNA framework APIs while retaining a seamless sense of integration with the Zune media experience.  In addition, this release now requires either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.”

With these tools, developers will be able to access music on the Zune (so long as it’s non-DRM) and use them in gameplay — Audiosurf, please. That’s my dream Zune game; it’s just so awesome, I can’t help it.

There are three important things the XNA guys wanted to highlight:

• Either Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition and higher (C# language support must be installed), or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition are required to install and run the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP.  Visual Studio 2005 SKUs are not supported with XNA Game Studio 3.0 and beyond.  However, you do not need to uninstall Visual Studio 2005 or XNA Game Studio 2.0, as those products will work side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 and XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP.
• This current CTP does not enable Xbox 360 game development.  Only Windows and Zune are supported in this CTP.  If you want to build and deploy games for the Xbox 360, you must continue using XNA Game Studio 2.0 for now.
• This CTP doesn’t work in 64 bit yet.  We plan to support it before RTM.

The final release of XNA Game Studio 3.0 is scheduled for this holiday season. There’s no word on exactly when we can expect to start seeing games, or if there will be any sort of preview event like 360 owners had earlier this year.

via XNA Team Blog