Converting the Quickstart Game Engine to XNA 4.0

Microsoft made a lot of changes to XNA between 3.1 and 4.0, and only recently have I had the time to look into converting the Quickstart Game Engine to run in XNA 4.0.

Here's Shawn Hargreaves list of breaking changes (changes that will break the engine) in XNA 4.0:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/03/16/breaking-changes-in-xna-game-studio-4-0.aspx

Some of these are a real pain, specifically the fact that they got rid of point sprites, which the particle system uses, and clipping planes, which the water planes use to render reflections and refractions.

Those are the two that I'll be struggling with for the next couple of days, but hopefully I'll soon have the engine running on XNA 4.0. I've also identified some possible significant performance benefits I may implement as well.

Stay tuned.

Screenshot from Quickstart Engine 0.22 (running on XNA 3.1):