So unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or don’t care about XNA :-P ), you obviously know that v3.1 was announced last week during the GDC. Not a lot of info has really been put out there as far as specifics go, this seems to be one of the best sources so far:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2009/03/24/9506368.aspx
- Support for customized Avatars
- Support for Xbox LIVE Party features
- Video playback
- Updated audio APIs for “fire-and-forget” scenarios
- Support for XACT3
- Automatic XNB serialization
- XNA Framework multi-targeting in the Visual Studio 2008 and/or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition IDE
- Downloadable content for Xbox LIVE Arcade titles that use XNA Game Studio 3.1
- Consumer notifications when an Xbox LIVE Community Game that they have purchased has been updated
Of course, the video playback feature stood out for me, as it would seem that it will affect the Scurvy.Media project. I’ve been getting some questions on the matter so I figured I’d just put my current thoughts out there.
Basically, I think it’s great :-) even if it ends up making the library completely obsolete. I imagine that they will have ways around some of the roadblocks I encountered such as large filesize issues, and texture compression. Depending on how their feature is factored, there *may* still be a place for Scurvy.Media … for example, I believe I read somewhere on the forums that it will only support WMV (don’t quote me on this, I may have misread or am not remembering right). But if this is the case, and they’ve factored some level of extensibility into their API, then Scurvy.Media may add support for AVI videos.
In the end, I’m quite happy to see this and the other features coming out … looking forward to giving the beta a shot when it’s announced eventually :-D