That's because it's not going to happen this fall.

Cut the Zune support. Add XAudio2 wrapper. Ship 3.0 :-)

For the record some of us quite like the idea of coding for the zune...

The ZMan [MVP/Moderator]:

For the record some of us quite like the idea of coding for the zune...

 * Machaira raises his hand

:D

Machaira:

The ZMan [MVP/Moderator]:

For the record some of us quite like the idea of coding for the zune...

* Machaira raises his hand

 * SimReality raises his hand as well.

Oh, there are lots of toys that it is neat to program for. Every hacked your TiVo, for example?
Seriously, though, do you believe you will sell any games for the Zune? I mean, in quantities larger than single digits?
Or, if you gave the game away for free, do you think you'd get more adopters than that (who do more than just try it out)?

Depends on when Microsoft gets Zunes to Canada and Europe and when they get a distribution model in place (Zune games are going to be developer-only at launch as described in that Channel 9 video). I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with for the device. It's very input and display limited so the game ideas that could come may be really bad or they may be really good. I could see these games doing fairly well once a distribution model is in place and there are Zunes in the hands of more people. Granted I would never consider it the only source of income for a studio, but it could be used as a fun extra to a PC/Xbox 360 game purchase or as an additional platform.

Shawn Hargreaves:

jwatte:

Will it also allow playing generated music/sound?

No.

It’s sad that one of the top five feature request on connect is not taken into account. Music and sound synthesis at runtime is a prerequisite for making game with dynamic sound experience like a virtual band game or any kind of interactive music. Why this choice? Is this because raw sound buffer access is not possible under xb360 (I doubt about that) or it’s just because xna dev think “raw sound buffer” is not enough a “high level API” for audio in XNA? If you make a parallel with the graphics capability of xna, it would be like not providing a “Draw” method to be overridden by the user, but only allow to modify the position of the models loaded from the fixed content pipeline : Think of the screen buffer as an audio buffer, and you’ll see that XNA Audio is far below from what we can expect and we have from the graphics part of XNA…

Seems we gonna have to continue playing with C++ wrapper to call real audio system and to forget about any port to xbox 360.

jwatte:

Cut the Zune support. Add XAudio2 wrapper. Ship 3.0 :-)

Yes! To both. Even though this is partially related on the Zune being pretty uninteresting for someone living in Europe - and by the time it hits the Old Continent it will have lost its appeal to early adopters :]

@lx:

Shawn Hargreaves:

jwatte:

Will it also allow playing generated music/sound?

No.

It’s sad that one of the top five feature request on connect is not taken into account.

I actually think our new audio API will address 90% of the people who voted on that request.

One of the differences between managed and native API design is that native APIs often just expose low level functionality, so people can then build something useful on top of it. That approach makes lots of things possible, but also everything tends to be pretty hard. Managed code uses a different design philosophy. The goal is not so much to provide low level building blocks, but to build things that directly solve actual problems for our users.

We did a lot of research when figuring out what audio features were important for v3, and spoke to a lot of customers about what they wanted. When we asked people why they wanted raw audio output, it turned out that the vast majority actually just wanted an easy way to play sound effects and compressed music, without having to use the XACT tool. From the subset of people who really did want something that required lower level wave output, we then asked for more information about exactly what they were planning on doing with that feature. Once we discarded all the vague "oh I don't know, it just seems like I might someday want that, don't know exactly what for though", we were only left with a tiny number of people who actually planned to use this functionality for real.

So we prioritized based on what the largest number of customers were asking for. Yes, the result of this investigation doesn't exactly match the top voted requests on Connect: that's because Connect is not the only source of information we use to make such decisions.

jwatte:

Oh, there are lots of toys that it is neat to program for. Every hacked your TiVo, for example?
Seriously, though, do you believe you will sell any games for the Zune? I mean, in quantities larger than single digits?
Or, if you gave the game away for free, do you think you'd get more adopters than that (who do more than just try it out)?

What I'm planning on in some cases is the same game for all 3 platforms. In a best case scenario, if they like it enough on either the 360 or PC, they might buy a discounted version (since they own a copy on one platform already) for the Zune. This won't work for every game, but there's enough cases of games coming out on both consoles/PC and handhelds to make me believe this could be a possibility.

Granted the Zune purchasing stuff would be down the road since the initial version will be a developer only thing like it was for the 360, but I'll be ready when it does allow it. :)

Is it too early to say what kind of API will be used? Will we pass in an xnb file name to load the sound? Will we able to pass in a stream to load the sound?

Shawn Hargreaves:

Managed code uses a different design philosophy. The goal is not so much to provide low level building blocks, but to build things that directly solve actual problems for our users.

I don't consider dynamic streaming audio as a "low level building block" that would not fit in a "managed code philosophy". Today for example, if someone wants to build an emulator for old arcade games on XNA, it's not possible (unless you stay on the windows platform and use some managed C++ wrapper to use other audio system). That's not probably the vast majority of xna developper users, but this kind of old games is always touching lots of end game users...
As i already said, the level of the XNA audio api is not at the level of the graphics api : on one side, with have static loading of fixed sound format, on the other side, with have dynamic streaming graphics. If i want to build a game with a particular sound effect (that i want to developp myself) like "a strange reverb on some sounds when the user enter a cave in a game", it's not possible.

Shawn Hargreaves:

we were only left with a tiny number of people who actually planned to use this functionality for real.

I believe you. Dynamic audio synthesis and effect is not something really common to the vast majority of the users, but i believe it's the future for the audio part of games.

Shawn Hargreaves:

So we prioritized based on what the largest number of customers were asking for.

Well, i should ask where the Zune support for 3.0 is coming from? Not from the largest number of your customers nor from connect (the only feature request was published after zune support was announced, and it was a feature request asking for windows mobile support...)
Note that i'm not against this support (although i only have a PDA with windows mobile 6, no support for it by the way...) but i feel disappointed when i look at other part of the framework that doesn't reach the maturity to say "okay, let's go to the zune platform now".


Still XNA is great and i'm really happy to see the developpement of such a framework. Hope that we'll see someday a versatile audio framework able to support new horizon of creativity...