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Is there a way to open XNA 4.0 projects in XNA 3.0 without installing XNA 4.0.

pinckerman
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Vishal
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  • I did this by manually reconfiguring a lot of things once, but it's not worth it unless the project is very simple. – Oofpez Apr 13 '12 at 11:33

7 Answers7

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If you're asking if you can load a project created with VS2010/XNA 4 in VS2008/GS3, then the answer is no.

There are enough differences in not only the XNA assemblies, but how the content pipeline is structured that you really need VS2010 installed. Is there any particular reason you don't want to install v4?

3Dave
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  • No,But I've heard across various forums that XNA 4.0 is a bit problemetic .Will do it soon though. – Vishal Jul 21 '11 at 14:43
  • I've been using it since it came out of beta with no issues of any kind. – 3Dave Jul 21 '11 at 14:45
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    XNA 4.0 is improved in many respects, especially with reducing superflous code for graphics rendering functions. – Chris C Sep 13 '11 at 17:26
  • There are no problems with XNA 4.0 compared to version 3. I used both versions. Version 4 has many improvements. I wouldn't advise porting back to version 3. Just use the cheat sheet (see the other answer) to get going. – Napoleon Nov 25 '11 at 15:17
  • No problems per se; it just broke a lot of things, so don't expect perfect backwards compatibility. If you're starting from scratch (this goes for just about anything) there's almost never a reason not to use the latest and greatest. – Cheezmeister Dec 08 '11 at 03:57
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If you're planning to port to XNA 4.0, you can use this XNA 3.1 to 4.0 cheat sheet to help you update your rendering code.

Chris C
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There is a built-in "importer" of sorts if you're going from XNA3.1 to VS2010/XNA4.0 (which i've tried with mixed results), but there isn't a way to go backwards. There are too many libraries and dependencies in 4.0 that simply aren't present in 3.1 or before.

JGagnon
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Update the project to XNA 4.0.

Check this page, contains a lot of useful information. Especially the section: "Are you trying to convert XNA 3.1 projects to XNA 4.0?"

http://nelxon.com/resources/xdsk2.php

EdgarT
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The answer is no. Because there are a lot of changes between them. The content pipeline, drawing states, vertex buffer and format, shader using and windows phone support.

zyangpointer
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I assume you are asking if you can open an XNA 4.0 project in XNA Game Studio 3.0. You cannot to that. XNA Game Studio 4.0 can only be used with Visual Studio 2010, and XNA Game Studio 3.0 can only be used with Visual Studio 2008.

There might exist unofficial hacks that will allow you to do this. But if you use these hacks, the Content Pipeline integration with VS will not work.

Steffan Pallesen
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You Can't Convert Higher Versions to Lower Versions since some libraries and assemblies don't exist in the lower versions but you can do the opposite,

in other words, you can't convert XNA 4.0 to XNA 3.1 (or you can't open XNA 4.0 in C# 2008) but you can convert XNA 3.1 into XNA 4.0, but still you have to check for the some changes though.

I hope I helped.

Zero
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