Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 on Dreamspark!

19 August 2009 Tags  , , ,

This was originally posted on the Deakin Student Partners Blog

In the words of Hubert J. Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!" – Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 are all now on Dreamspark, free to students! Expression Studio 3 brings some awesome improvements to.. well.. every product in it – Blend 3 + SketchFlow, Web + Super Preview, Encoder now has screencasting.

expression_studio_3_photoscope

Expression Studio 3 Highlights

  • Expression Encoder 3
    • Improved H.264
    • VBR Smooth Streaming
    • Source CODECs
    • Audio Enhancements.
    • Performance
    • Live Encoding
    • Screen Capture
    • Improved profile pallete
    • Silverlight 3 Media Players
    • New player skins
    • API Enhancements
    • Win7 Integration
    • SDK "in the box"
  • Expression Blend 3
    • SketchFlow – Sketch WPF/Silverlight interactive prototypes.
    • Photoshop and Illustrator support
    • Styling Controls: Creating templates from artwork
    • Styling Controls: Creating TextBox Templates from Artwork
    • States: Improved Support for VSM
    • Interactivity: Behaviors
    • Working with and Generating Data
  • Expression Web 3
    • Super Preview – view side by side comparisons of your website in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7/8 and more
    • Publish with SFTP/FTPS
    • Improved Photoshop PSD support – import just the layers you want!
    • Silverlight support – uses Expression Encoder 3 to encode (nearly) any video you want to Silverlight and embed on your site!
    • TFS SC support
    • Deep Zoom Composer support


XNA Game Studio 3.1 Highlights xna_20

  • Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
  • Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
  • Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
    • Full screen video playback
    • Video playback to simple textures in game
    • Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
    • Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
    • Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
    • Play back multiple video streams at the same time
  • Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
  • Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add custom types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
  • XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
  • Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.

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