14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters already running Kodu Game Lab on Windows computers can now upgrade to the latest testing release offered by Microsoft. Earlier this week, the Redmond company released Build 1.0.70.0 of the Kodu Game Lab Technical Preview through the Microsoft Download Center. As the Technical Preview label implies, Kodu Game Lab continues to be in development at this point in time, and as such, testers should expect to run into various problems.
Kodu Game Lab Technical Preview Build 1.0.70.0 for example is designed to resolve some issues identified in the previous development releases of the tool. “This fixes the crashing bug related to the "New empty world" menu option. And some other, minor bugs,” revealed a member of the Kodu team.
I have been playing around with Microsoft’s visual programming language set up to democratize the creation of games since the software giant released the PC version. From the get go I had some issues with performance, although I’ve been testing it on a rather powerful computer. It appears that the Redmond company is well aware of the problems involving performance in Kodu. The promise from Microsoft is that it is currently exploring a new strategy to increase responsiveness, especially in relation to lower end machines.
“If you have Kodu configured for Shader Model 2 and Effects turned off then this feature will be activated when your frame rate gets low. The only indication that this has turned on is that the "frame per second" text (if turned on in the configuration) will turn red. What we're doing is updating the UI elements more frequently than we're updating the world. Hopefully this will make the UI feel more responsive even though the overall frame rate is still the same. Please let me know if you detect the difference and whether or not it helps,” the Kodu team representative.
Kodu is available for download here.
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