Support for XNA in WP8?

Question

After watching a little bit of the summit keynote I kind of heard conflicting reports about it, but is it official that XNA is being dropped for WP8? I\'m guessing since the fut

Answer 1

the official wp7dev twitter account had this to say too

"XNA Framework apps are fully supported in WP8. The new WP SDK will support building XNA Framework games for both WP7.x & for WP8" https://twitter.com/wp7dev/status/215513026374270977

Personally given the lack of XNA updates or information and the lack of any Metro support on windows 8 I'm staying a little skeptical until I see an SDK and the publishing rules.

Answer 2

I've been working on and off on an XNA game that I had started with VS2010 & WP 7 SDK, and later upgraded to 7.5 (Mango). I loaded up that project in VS2012 and the WP8 SDK and it ran just fine, compiled with no errors and ran smoothly.

As previously stated, XNA projects in VS2012 and the WP8 SDK can only target the WP 7.1 platform. On the upside, all phones running WP 7.5, the upcoming 7.8 and WP8 will run your game without any issues. From that point of view, XNA is fully supported in the WP8 SDK, on WP8 devices, but these WILL NOT be WP8 projects.

By not being WP8 projects, the downside is that you CANNOT use WP8-exclusive features, such as:

• In-app purchasing / micro-transactions (this one hurts XNA devs the most)
• Your games will always be 800x480 since you need WP8 projects to support higher resolutions. Your XNA games should automatically scale up when run on devices with a higher res
• Exclusive WP8 networking features & APIs, including Bluetooth and NFC
• Speech and voice recognition APIs
• Your XNA game cannot register a protocol extension for app-to-app communications
• New Live Tile templates

The dev highlights for WP8 are on the wpdev blog at http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/05/windows-phone-8-developer-platform-highlights.aspx.

Answer 3

Mary Jo Foley had this to say about that:

Microsoft officials have said the XNA tools/runtime environment used primarily by game developers isn't supported on Windows 8. On Windows Phone 8, XNA is "supported," so existing Windows Phone games will run. But Microsoft's advice to phone developers going forward, just like it is for Windows 8, is to use native code, meaning C and C++, to write games.

Answer 4

I'm sure it's too early to speculate on this at this point, we'll see when the SDK is released. But from what I've seen so far - I would say yes, XNA might not be officially supported WP8 and onwards (read - new features will probably only be available via the DirectX interface, but existing features will continue to be supported). However, according to this thread, games that use Monogame to run on Windows 8 metro will pass certification. So in one way or the other, the platform will not die.

Edit: I just noticed this tweet from Shawn Hargreaves: Windows Phone 8 runs all 7 apps including XNA ones. We're adding new features (native code, D3D) not taking away old ones

Answer 5

As the public WP8 SDK is now available, I can confirm that you cannot develop XNA apps for the #WP8 platform directly. You can only target the WP7 platform with your XNA apps and they will run on WP8 devices just fine.