What’s New in the July 2012 Durango XDK

The July 2012 release of the Durango XDK from Microsoft contains the following new features, tools, and documentation.

For features that shipped in a previous Durango XDK release, see the What’s New document for that release.

Release Notes and Durango XDK Updates

The most recent release notes and Durango XDK updates can always be found on Durango Downloads on the Xbox Game Developer site. For access, log in with your ID and password on https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/games/xbox/partner/index; at the top of the page, point to Development and click Downloads.

The Durango developer support group sends e-mail to Durango developers whenever a new Durango XDK is released. Also, you can check with your account manager for the latest information about upcoming Durango XDK releases.

Changes for This Release

WebSockets support is now available
In this release, we have added support for the WebSocket protocol—the web technology that enables establishing a bi-directional, full-duplex communications channel with a web server. This support is exposed by the Windows.Networking.Sockets namespace.

Note that only the parts of the namespace that implement the WebSocket protocol are available. If you are using sockets for any application other than WebSocket implementation, you should continue to use Winsock.

New Direct3D 11.1 tessellation support
With this release, the Durango User-Mode Driver (UMD), known more formally as the Xbox User-Mode Driver for Direct3D 11.1, now supports the three graphics pipeline stages that implement tessellation: the Hull Shader, the Tessellator, and the Domain Shader. Direct3D 11.1 tessellation converts low-detail subdivision surfaces into higher-detail primitives suitable for GPU rendering. Some specific benefits of tessellation include:

• Apps can save memory and bandwidth by using tessellation to render higher-detailed surfaces from low-resolution models as needed.
• Apps can show increased surface detail using displacement mapping with tessellation.
• Apps can use scalable-rendering techniques, such as continuous or view dependent levels-of-detail, which can be calculated on the fly.
• Developers can improve app performance by executing expensive computations on a lower-detail model, executing expensive computations less frequently. Examples include blending calculations using blend shapes or morph targets for realistic animation, or physics calculations for collision detection or soft body dynamics.

User-Mode Driver improvements
In addition to adding tessellation support, the User-Mode Driver (UMD) includes other updates:

• ID3D11DeviceContext::ClearUnorderedAccessView[Float|Uint] now works. See MSDN for details on using these methods.
• An updated GPU performance counter API now returns performance counter values from each instance of each hardware unit. You can see these new counters in the PIX Hardware Counters view, or access them as vendor-specific performance counters using the D3D11 Counter API.

New features in PIX
PIX now supports flexible arrangement of views within the PIX user interface shell. You can resize, close, and move views to new locations. Additionally, you can create new instances of existing views, so that you can, for example, browse multiple resources simultaneously.

PIX also includes the following updates to existing views:

• The primary display for frame captures now includes a GPU timeline visualization of draw events.
• The resource browser now includes views of constant buffers and textures for the selected draw event.

Deployment is now faster and smarter
We’ve made two big changes in this release to make deploying your app to your development kit faster and smarter.

• First, we’ve dramatically improved the speed of incremental deployment when using Visual Studio.
• Second, we’ve stopped deleting your content from your development kit.

Previously, when you deployed an app to your development kit, we deleted files from the console target directory that weren’t in the build directory on your development PC. This interfered with your ability to manage assets and game content on your development kit by yourself, and forced you to copy such content to the development kit repeatedly for common scenarios. We’ve heard your feedback on this issue, and we’ve fixed it. Now, when we deploy an app to the development kit, our default is to not delete anything from the target directory.

Visual Studio projects for Durango apps now have a property named Remove Extra Files that you can set to “true” to use the old behavior of deleting content from the target directory on deployment. If you use the xbApp.exe tool to deploy from outside Visual Studio, the new ‘/S’ command line switch has the same effect, invoking the old behavior of deleting content from the target directory.

Gamepad API now supports trigger vibration effects with new Durango controller
Various vibration effects can be activated in the Durango controller triggers to provide a more immersive gaming experience. Note that these trigger vibration effects can only enabled on the Durango Controllers and not the standard Xbox 360 controllers. Prototypes of the Durango controllers will be available soon. How to: Activate the Gamepad Impulse Triggers demonstrates the use of the trigger vibration effects.

New way to specify the IP address of a console
We have added a new way for developers to specify the IP address of the development kit a project will be deployed to. Durango projects now have a property named Remote IP Address, which you should set to the IP address of your development kit.

In this release, we continue to support the old method of setting the IP address in DurangoConfig.xml. However, this support will be removed from a future release. We encourage you to start using the Remote IP Address property now.

Multiple configurations can now build to the same output directory
Previously, we didn’t allow you to build multiple configurations (Debug, Release) into the same output directory on the PC. Starting with this release, we provide a project property called Allow Multiple Configurations to enable that scenario. This change, in combination with not deleting extra files from the target directory, should reduce the amount of time you spend copying game assets and content files to your development kit.