Microsoft released today a new version of its Xbox360 and Windows game development platform XNA. XNA was released last year as a free tool for hobbyists and studios alike to easily develop games using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework. The new XNA Game Studio 2.0 offers 15 new features from which the most note worthy is the ability to create online multiplayer games for the both the Xbox360 and Windows through Xbox LIVE. Learn more about this new release from XNA’s official page.

Adobe released yesterday device profile update #4 for Device Central CS3 , the mobile phone emulation tool for testing and debugging Flash Lite content on your computer. 49 new mobile device profiles are added in this update bringing the total number of model profiles in Device Central to 364.

Device Central provides a database of mobile phones specifications and supported Flash Lite featured, it also allows the user to emulate these device and test created Flash Lite games and movies on the computer itself.

You can learn more about this latest update for Device Central from its online portal here.

[via Flash Devices]

A new advertising network that could be of great interest to Flash game developers is MochiAds. This advertisement network provides developers with the opportunity to monetize their games with online advertisement easily. In the past, game developers had to look for and negotiate sponsorship deals with advertisers in order to be able to make money out of their games and that was not easy at all. Using MochiAds anybody can implement the advertisement code within his Flash game and generate money depending on how much traffic his game receives. MochiAds directly deals with the advertisers and takes a share of the profit with performing games on the network.

The interesting thing about Mochi is that it offers three different kinds of advertisement including one in-game solution for showing the advertisement while the game is played. MochAds also offers free hosting and traffic analysis services for game developers using the MochiAds network. However, currently MochiAds makes its payment for game publishers through paypal only.

You can learn more about MochiAds by visiting its official website.

Natural Motion announced today the release of its new animation system, Morpheme. Morpheme is the industry’s first graphically-authorable animation engine for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. It has been designed from the ground up to give animators unprecedented control over the final look of their animations in-game. Morpheme consists of a run-time animation engine, morpheme:runtime and a powerful 3D authoring application for animators morpheme:connect. You can read more in the official site, or Register and watch a sneak preview demonstrating the work flow in morpheme:connect.

WiiCade.com recently accomplished another achievement in the Flash development scene for the Nintendo Wii by releasing a software that allows Flash developers to interact with Flash movies using the buttons of the Wii game remote. Flash developers were previously only able to make use of motion sensing features of the Wii-mote and had no access to the buttons or the tilt sensing features (which remains inaccessible). This new software shall open up many new opportunities for independent developers for creating Flash games and applications for the Wii. You can learn more about the Wii-mote button API and download it for free at WiiCade.com.

[via Joystiq]

Knowledge Oasis Muscat held its annual gaming conference eGames on the 10th and 11th of December with a focus this year on mobile gaming and serious gaming (gaming for training and educational purposes). The sessions of the conference were delivered by expert speakers from Sun Microsystems, Ericsson, Yahoo!, and various international game development firms, British educational institutes and Omani mobile operators.

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Microsoft released earlier this week the full version of its game development tool XNA Game Studio Express. The free tool created for game students and hobbyists could be used to create games for the Windows and the Xbox 360 platforms. The kit is based on the Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework and currently works only on Windows XP. Microsoft also launched the XNA Creators Club as a companion to its game creation tool as subscription based community to share developed games and access special asset libraries. You can learn more about XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Creators Club from the following link.

Oman Mobile launched its second mobile game on the 10th of December at a special launch event held at the Crowne Plaza Muscat. The authentic Omani game titled “Shaking Funjan” was developed in Holland upon a game concept selected through a competition organised by Oman Mobile and the Sultan Qaboos University for high education students in Oman. The quality of the game was ensured by hiring Mobile2win, a random Indian company that makes trademark-infringing silly mobile games such as Lord of the Drinks, Toilet Trainer, and Spinny Alley.

Nobody knows how Shaking Funjan really plays like, the game was not demoed at the event and the official website does not mention anything about its gameplay. There is no online demo, there is no offline demo. You have to actually purchase the game to learn about how it plays. To download the game, you will have to first pay 1 Rial Omani and then pay 3 Baizas for each kb (and just in case you didn’t know, that’s a bit, not a byte) you download, there is no actual or approximate size mentioned on the website, it could be 10 kilobytes, 100 kilobytes, or just about anything.

You can learn more on how to waste 1 Rial (plus download charges) on the game with the most ridiculous main character name via this link.

KOM recently announced a 15% discount on the conference delegate fees for registrations before the 22nd of November. The eGames gaming conference is due to take place on the 10th and 11th of December and it shall be focused on mobile gaming and serious gaming. More details could be found here.

A recent update at eGames states that the conference will feature a workshop on promoting virtual reality as a marketing opportunity by taking Second Life as an example. The workshop will be delivered by the Director of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University and Gavin Dudeney of The Consultants-E. You can learn more details about this upcoming workshop from this link.