March 2024 GDK Update 9 Public Release

March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • March 2024 GDK Update 9
  • March 2024 GDK Update 7
  • March 2024 GDK Update 6
  • March 2024 GDK Update 5
  • March 2024 GDK Update 4
  • March 2024 GDK Update 3
  • March 2024 GDK Update 2
  • March 2024 GDK Update 1
  • March 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

March 2024 GDK Update 9

Notifications

Azure PlayFab Party

The version of Microsoft PlayFab Party that's included in the GDK has been updated to v1.10.5. You can view the release notes at PlayFab Party Release Notes - PlayFab | Microsoft Learn.

Issue fixes

Tools

Fixed an issue that caused the Visual Studio 2019 integrated development environment (IDE) to stop responding. This occurred when an attempt was made to open the GDK documentation from the Xbox Gaming Explorer and other integrated GDK tooling windows.

Media

Fixed an issue that caused the title to stop responding upon source reader termination. This was caused by Media Foundation transform (MFT) samples being freed without waiting on pending fences.

Fixed an issue that caused the title to stop responding because of incorrect fence waits. This occurred during Source Reader shutdown with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video playback.

March 2024 GDK Update 7

Issue fixes

Tools

Fixed an issue that prevented users with work accounts from signing in to the Store Association Wizard in the Microsoft Game Config Editor.

Media

Fixed an issue where a thread object wasn't getting released correctly in the H264 decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT). This caused a memory leak.

Fixed an issue where pending decoder fence waits could cause memory corruption when the decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT) or Source Reader was being released. The memory corruption could result in the title crashing when attempting to playback video.

March 2024 GDK Update 6

Notifications

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 changed the encoding of PlayFab Party headers from UTF-8 to UTF-16 LE BOM, which is unsupported by some build infrastructures. This update reverts PlayFab Party headers back to UTF-8 encoding.

March 2024 GDK Update 5

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime.

PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

March 2024 GDK Update 4

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

March 2024 GDK Update 3

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

March 2024 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where the use of XLaunchNewGame combined with the XGameSaveFiles API set would result in a sharing violation error and the inability to access saved content after launching a new game.

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

March 2024 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

Xbox services

Fixed an issue that was introduced in the March 2024 GDK where Zlib symbols were unintentionally exposed by libHttpClient.lib. This exposure caused a multiple definition linker error for titles that used XSAPI and the Zlib library.

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header caused the request to skip sending the final empty chunk. The request would then fail.

March 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Input

As of the March 2024 GDK release, the GDK installer no longer installs the GameInput libraries.

If you're targeting PC, add the Microsoft.GameInput NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.GameInput/) to your solution. Run the NuGet package's GameInput redistributable MSI to ensure that you have the latest runtime. Although the runtime is included in Windows May 2020 Updates and later, running the MSI will ensure that you have the latest version.
Include this redistributable in game installers to ensure that GameInput is available on all supported versions of Windows.

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended. [49474469]

October 2024 GDK Public Release

October 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the October 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • October 2024 GDK
  • Known issues
• Documentation

What's new in the October 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

October 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

System

Beginning with the October 2024 GDK release, the directory layout of the various extension libraries (for example, XSAPI, XCURL, GameChat, and PlayFab) has been modified to shorten the overall path length and simplify use in custom build systems. These changes are automatically handled by MSBuild rules for those customers who are using the Gaming.*.x64 GDK build platforms. No changes are required in these scenarios.

The changes between March 2024 and August 2024 are described by the following string substitutions.

• "DesignTime\CommonConfiguration\neutral\ExtensionLibrary.props" is now "ExtensionLibrary.props"
• "DesignTime\CommonConfiguration\neutral\Include" is now "Include"
• "DesignTime\CommonConfiguration\neutral\Lib" is now "Lib\x64"
• "Redist\CommonConfiguration\neutral" is now "Redist\x64"

GDK tools

Support for using the Visual Studio 2017 IDE for game development was removed in the October 2022 GDK. Support for building games with the Visual Studio 2017 toolset (v141) remained in place for use with Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio 2022 to ease the transition to a newer toolset.

Beginning with the October 2024 GDK, support for building with the v141 toolset will be removed. Note that versions of the GDK prior to October 2024 will continue to support building with the v141 toolset.

Microsoft Azure PlayFab

In the PlayFab Economy inventory redemption APIs, PFInventoryRedemptionSuccess and PFInventoryRedemptionFailure responses now return marketplaceAlternateId instead of offerId.

Customers who use these APIs must update their code to use the new marketplaceAlternateId field.

Notifications

Multiplayer

• Improved internal diagnostics.
• Updated PFMultiplayerCreateServerBackfillTicket to automatically handle failures where a match member is already a member of too many tickets. In this situation, the SDK automatically cancels existing tickets for members of the backfill ticket and retries ticket creation.

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

• Fixed an issue for the Xbox October 20024 GDK where some events wouldn't be queued after suspending and resuming a title.
• Fixed an issue for the Xbox October 2024 GDK that caused a crash after suspending and resuming a title.
• Fixed an issue where the internal PubSub notification WebSocket was slow to detect and react to disconnects. This could lead to errors when creating or joining lobbies and matchmaking tickets.
• Fixed an issue where failure of PubSub to establish a connection with the SignalR service wouldn't trigger a failed state change and wouldn't allow subsequent Multiplayer API calls to subscribe to PubSub.

Known issues

GDK tools

In Visual Studio 2019, opening the GDK Help file by using the "?" button from the Xbox Gaming Explorer or any other Xbox tool windows in Visual Studio 2019 causes the GDK Help file to open to its overview page. This occurs rather than the topic page opening that's specific to the tool being used. This issue doesn't occur when using Visual Studio 2022. [54221676]

Documentation

Offline documentation for the October 2024 release of the GDKX is installed on your development PC by the GDKX Setup program. After running Setup, the Help file for the GDKX (gdk.chm) is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft GDK\Documentation.

• The online GDKX documentation is at http://aka.ms/gdkonline.

June 2024 GDK Update 3 Public Release

June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • June 2024 GDK Update 3
  • June 2024 GDK Update 2
  • June 2024 GDK Update 1
  • June 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

June 2024 GDK Update 3

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime.

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The June 2024 Update 3 GDK includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

Issue fixes

Media

Fixed an issue that caused a small memory leak during the initialization of the H264/HEVC decoder Media Foundation transforms (MFTs).

Fixed an issue where pending decoder fence waits could cause memory corruption when the decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT) or Source Reader was being released. The memory corruption could result in the title crashing when attempting to playback video.

Fixed an issue that caused the title to stop responding because of incorrect fence waits. This occurred during Source Reader shutdown with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video playback.

Fixed an issue where a thread object wasn't getting released correctly in the H264 decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT). This caused a memory leak.

GDK tools

Fixed an issue that prevented users with work accounts from signing in to the Store Association Wizard in the Microsoft Game Config Editor.

Fixed an issue that caused the Visual Studio 2019 integrated development environment (IDE) to stop responding. This occurred when an attempt was made to open the GDK documentation from the Xbox Gaming Explorer and other integrated GDK tooling windows.

June 2024 GDK Update 2

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) reception regression that incorrectly allocated temporary queue buffers from system partition memory instead of the title partition when title-provided buffers were unavailable. This regression potentially reduced download performance under default XNetworkingConfigurationSetting values.

June 2024 GDK Update 1

Notifications

Input

The GameInput API now breaks in when a debugger is connected, and it detects a possible large number of reference leaks. This is triggered only in development scenarios and is a signal that your game might be leaking references and could deadlock input.

Issue fixes

PIX for Windows

Fixed an issue that caused PIX to crash after adjusting the font size when using a non-EN culture.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

June 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Xbox services

The Xbox.Services.API.C extension library (XSAPI) now has an additional .dll dependency, libHttpClient. This .dll must be included in the game's shipped package and configured properly for XSAPI to function. When using the GDK with Visual Studio, the library is automatically loaded. For custom engines and other build systems, see guidance for XSAPI configuration in C/C++ Custom engine integration for PC: get started.

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Documentation

Offline documentation for the June 2024 release of the GDKX is installed on your development PC by the GDKX Setup program. After running Setup, the Help file for the GDKX (gdk.chm) is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft GDK\Documentation.

• The online GDKX documentation is at http://aka.ms/gdkonline.

March 2024 GDK Update 8 Public Release

March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • March 2024 GDK Update 7
  • March 2024 GDK Update 6
  • March 2024 GDK Update 5
  • March 2024 GDK Update 4
  • March 2024 GDK Update 3
  • March 2024 GDK Update 2
  • March 2024 GDK Update 1
  • March 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

March 2024 GDK Update 7

Issue fixes

Tools

Fixed an issue that prevented users with work accounts from signing in to the Store Association Wizard in the Microsoft Game Config Editor.

Media

Fixed an issue where a thread object wasn't getting released correctly in the H264 decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT). This caused a memory leak.

Fixed an issue where pending decoder fence waits could cause memory corruption when the decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT) or Source Reader was being released. The memory corruption could result in the title crashing when attempting to playback video.

March 2024 GDK Update 6

Notifications

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 changed the encoding of PlayFab Party headers from UTF-8 to UTF-16 LE BOM, which is unsupported by some build infrastructures. This update reverts PlayFab Party headers back to UTF-8 encoding.

March 2024 GDK Update 5

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime.

PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

March 2024 GDK Update 4

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

March 2024 GDK Update 3

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

March 2024 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where the use of XLaunchNewGame combined with the XGameSaveFiles API set would result in a sharing violation error and the inability to access saved content after launching a new game.

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

March 2024 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

Xbox services

Fixed an issue that was introduced in the March 2024 GDK where Zlib symbols were unintentionally exposed by libHttpClient.lib. This exposure caused a multiple definition linker error for titles that used XSAPI and the Zlib library.

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header caused the request to skip sending the final empty chunk. The request would then fail.

March 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Input

As of the March 2024 GDK release, the GDK installer no longer installs the GameInput libraries.

If you're targeting PC, add the Microsoft.GameInput NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.GameInput/) to your solution. Run the NuGet package's GameInput redistributable MSI to ensure that you have the latest runtime. Although the runtime is included in Windows May 2020 Updates and later, running the MSI will ensure that you have the latest version.
Include this redistributable in game installers to ensure that GameInput is available on all supported versions of Windows.

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended. [49474469]

March 2024 GDK Update 7 Public Release

March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes (Update 7)

Introduction

Welcome to the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit with Xbox Extensions (GDKX) Update 6 release. You can use the GDKX to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs, Windows 10 PCs, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S consoles by using a shared codebase.

• The March 2024 GDKX can be installed side-by-side with GDKXs from November 2019 and later.
• You can download GDKX releases from https://aka.ms/gdkdl.
• The release notes for all GDKX releases are at https://aka.ms/gdkreleasenotes.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • March 2024 GDK Update 7
  • March 2024 GDK Update 6
  • March 2024 GDK Update 5
  • March 2024 GDK Update 4
  • March 2024 GDK Update 3
  • March 2024 GDK Update 2
  • March 2024 GDK Update 1
  • March 2024 GDK
• Documentation

NOTE: Release notes have a number after their descriptions, such as [12345678]. This number represents an internal ID that Microsoft uses to track the work and history relating to the item. This number can be useful to your developer account manager if you have questions about a particular release note.

---

What's new in the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDKX and the GDK are released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed by partners).
• To view the full What's new section, see the online version of What's new.
• To view release notes for previous versions, see release notes posts on the GDK forums, or view the release notes in the online documentation at GDK release notes.

---

March 2024 GDK Update 7

Issue fixes

Tools

Fixed an issue that prevented users with work accounts from signing in to the Store Association Wizard in the Microsoft Game Config Editor. [54196987]

Media

Fixed an issue where a thread object wasn't getting released correctly in the H264 decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT). This caused a memory leak. [54112698]

Fixed an issue where pending decoder fence waits could cause memory corruption when the decoder Media Foundation Transform (MFT) or Source Reader was being released. The memory corruption could result in the title crashing when attempting to playback video. [53842023]

System

Fixed an issue that resulted in graphics page protections losing execute permissions during GPU captures. This issue was masked by using the default heap. [53863936]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 6

Notifications

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 changed the encoding of PlayFab Party headers from UTF-8 to UTF-16 LE BOM, which is unsupported by some build infrastructures. This update reverts PlayFab Party headers back to UTF-8 encoding. [53843657]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 5

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime. [53339292]

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

[53520669]

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) reception regression that incorrectly allocated temporary queue buffers from system partition memory instead of the title partition when title-provided buffers were unavailable. This regression potentially reduced download performance under default XNetworkingConfigurationSetting values. [52267705]

Media

Fixed an issue that caused a small memory leak during the initialization of the H264/HEVC decoder Media Foundation transforms (MFTs). [53390307]

Graphics

Fixed an issue where the debug layer incorrectly reported invalid flags in the GetResourceAllocationInfo API when using the new D3D12_RESOURCE_FLAG_RAYTRACING_ACCELERATION_STRUCTURE flag to create an acceleration structure. [53520985]

Audio

Fixed an issue where a title could crash or stop responding when using the XAPU API for an Opus decode. [53671496]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 4

Notifications

Graphics

D3D12XBOX_COMPUTE_SHADER_LIMITS_DESC.MaxWavesPerSa has been renamed to D3D12XBOX_COMPUTE_SHADER_LIMITS_DESC.MaxWavesPerSe. The previous name has been retained in a union. The clamp values have been fixed to allow proper per-SE maximum values. This limit has always been per-SE, despite the incorrect name. [52844031]

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation. [52989092]

Issue fixes

PIX

Fixed an issue where switching to using enhanced barrier APIs caused PIX to display all constant buffers as acceleration structures by default. [51803911]

Fixed an issue in PIX where using DispatchRays (DirectX Raytracing (DXR)) within ExecuteIndirect caused the Pipeline view to appear empty except for heaps. [52413175]

Fixed an issue that caused PIX to leak memory when video frames were captured in Timing Captures. [52880909]

Graphics

Fixed an issue where a rare assertion failure in XDXROfflineBVH.dll would occur when building an offline bottom-level acceleration structure (BLAS). [52560914]

Memory

Fixed an issue where some management threads in the kernel memory system would never exit. This could affect performance in some titles with system threads consuming significant CPU time on CPU5,6 (or CPU12,13 for simultaneous multithreading (SMT)). [52991454]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 3

Issue fixes

PIX

Fixed an issue that caused PIX to occasionally stop responding when closing a Timing Capture. [51788534]

Fixed an issue in PIX where it might crash when selecting the memory pie chart in the Live view if the API object table was set to Summary. [51483482]

Fixed an issue where switching to using enhanced barrier APIs caused PIX to display all constant buffers as acceleration structures by default. [51803911]

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown. [51753450]

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting. [51969958]

Graphics

Fixed an issue where offline BVH Dehydration (introduced in the March 2024 GDK) can silently fail when the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) has a very small number of triangles. [52070116]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 2

Notifications

Graphics

Increased the performance of the crossover threshold when switching from a bitonic sort to a radix sort in the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) builder. [51016726]

Redundant root signature and pipeline state changes have been removed from the bitonic sort system. [51016708]

The raytracing batched BVH builder has been optimized to allow for concurrent sort dispatches and to minimize barriers. This can significantly improve GPU utilization and reduce BVH build times for batched builds. [51016687]

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where the use of XLaunchNewGame combined with the XGameSaveFiles API set would result in a sharing violation error and the inability to access saved content after launching a new game. [50917018]

Fixed an issue where crash dumps might not be collected if there wasn't enough title memory available. [50984583]

Fixed a crash in the xmem component when a fence is allocated or freed in titles that are using the 2310 or later GDK. [50484695]

Fixed an issue that could cause the title to crash when resuming if downloadable content (DLC) was added to the console while the title was suspended. [51134872]

Graphics

Fixed a resource leak that occurred when destroying the Direct3D device with raytracing enabled. [51016662]

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle. [50672912]

---

March 2024 GDK Update 1

Notifications

Performance Investigator for Xbox (PIX)

Significantly increased the speed at which the PIX Pipelin...

October 2023 GDK Update 7 Public Release

October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • October 2023 GDK Update 6
  • October 2023 GDK Update 5
  • October 2023 GDK Update 4
  • October 2023 GDK Update 2
  • October 2023 GDK Update 1
  • October 2023 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

October 2023 GDK Update 6

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

Issue fixes

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

October 2023 GDK Update 5

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

October 2023 GDK Update 4

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header would cause the request to not send the final empty chunk and ultimately fail.

Video

Fixed an issue where Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs could crash due to a missing delay loaded dependency.

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended.

October 2023 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

PlayFab

Fixed an issue that could result in a "dll not found" error message when attempting to reference PlayFab.Core or PlayFab.Services libraries.

Packaging

Fixed an issue where the MicrosoftGame.Config editor would delete certain fields if the user added them to the file using a text editor.

October 2023 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where protocol activation wasn't properly handling relative paths to the target executable.

Streaming

Fixed several issues where the title could crash or the streaming client properties would report no data if a streaming client connected while the XGameStreamingInitialize API was executing.

Xbox services

Fixed a race condition in WinHttpWebsocket teardown on suspend that could cause the title to crash or stop responding.

Fixed an issue where using XSAPI or PlayFab with trace logging enabled at information or verbose levels could cause the title to crash.

Fixed an issue that could cause the title to crash when calling PeoplehubService::DeserializeTitleHistory for certain locales.

October 2023 GDK

Notifications

Visual Studio support

The GDK currently supports building game projects with the Visual Studio 2017 compiler and linker toolset (version v141) either from the command line or from the Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio 2022 IDEs.

Support for building game projects with the v141 toolset will be removed in the October 2024 version of the GDK.

Issue fixes

Commerce

Fixed an issue with XStoreQueryAssociatedProductsAsync where the maxItemsToRetrievePerPage parameter wasn't returning the correct number of results when 26 or more products were requested.

Known issues

Middleware

Systems using the GDK Unity Package that have only the public GDK installed will have missing DLL issues in Unity projects until the next plugin release.

For more information and a quick fix, see Plugin fails to load DLLs/Tools for public GDK installs Issue #93 microsoft/gdk-unity-package.

This issue is resolved, make sure you are using the latest GDK Unity Package.

March 2024 GDK Update 6 Public Release

March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • March 2024 GDK Update 6
  • March 2024 GDK Update 5
  • March 2024 GDK Update 4
  • March 2024 GDK Update 3
  • March 2024 GDK Update 2
  • March 2024 GDK Update 1
  • March 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

March 2024 GDK Update 6

Notifications

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 changed the encoding of PlayFab Party headers from UTF-8 to UTF-16 LE BOM, which is unsupported by some build infrastructures. This update reverts PlayFab Party headers back to UTF-8 encoding.

March 2024 GDK Update 5

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime.

PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

March 2024 GDK Update 4

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

March 2024 GDK Update 3

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

March 2024 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where the use of XLaunchNewGame combined with the XGameSaveFiles API set would result in a sharing violation error and the inability to access saved content after launching a new game.

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

March 2024 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

Xbox services

Fixed an issue that was introduced in the March 2024 GDK where Zlib symbols were unintentionally exposed by libHttpClient.lib. This exposure caused a multiple definition linker error for titles that used XSAPI and the Zlib library.

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header caused the request to skip sending the final empty chunk. The request would then fail.

March 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Input

As of the March 2024 GDK release, the GDK installer no longer installs the GameInput libraries.

If you're targeting PC, add the Microsoft.GameInput NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.GameInput/) to your solution. Run the NuGet package's GameInput redistributable MSI to ensure that you have the latest runtime. Although the runtime is included in Windows May 2020 Updates and later, running the MSI will ensure that you have the latest version.
Include this redistributable in game installers to ensure that GameInput is available on all supported versions of Windows.

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended. [49474469]

March 2024 GDK Update 5 Public Release

March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • March 2024 GDK Update 5
  • March 2024 GDK Update 4
  • March 2024 GDK Update 3
  • March 2024 GDK Update 2
  • March 2024 GDK Update 1
  • March 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the March 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

March 2024 GDK Update 5

Notifications

Setup

The GDK installer now detects an already-installed .NET 8 runtime and no longer installs an older version of the .NET runtime.

Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party

The March 2024 GDK Update 5 includes the 1.10.1 release of PlayFab Party. This update includes all the changes from the 1.10.0 release that are described in the PlayFab Party Release Notes and the following issue fix.

• Fixed an issue where the PlayFab Party library could crash when establishing direct peer connections in networks with three or more devices.

March 2024 GDK Update 4

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

March 2024 GDK Update 3

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

March 2024 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where the use of XLaunchNewGame combined with the XGameSaveFiles API set would result in a sharing violation error and the inability to access saved content after launching a new game.

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

March 2024 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

Xbox services

Fixed an issue that was introduced in the March 2024 GDK where Zlib symbols were unintentionally exposed by libHttpClient.lib. This exposure caused a multiple definition linker error for titles that used XSAPI and the Zlib library.

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header caused the request to skip sending the final empty chunk. The request would then fail.

March 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Input

As of the March 2024 GDK release, the GDK installer no longer installs the GameInput libraries.

If you're targeting PC, add the Microsoft.GameInput NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.GameInput/) to your solution. Run the NuGet package's GameInput redistributable MSI to ensure that you have the latest runtime. Although the runtime is included in Windows May 2020 Updates and later, running the MSI will ensure that you have the latest version.
Include this redistributable in game installers to ensure that GameInput is available on all supported versions of Windows.

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended. [49474469]

October 2023 GDK Update 6 Public Release

October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • October 2023 GDK Update 6
  • October 2023 GDK Update 5
  • October 2023 GDK Update 4
  • October 2023 GDK Update 2
  • October 2023 GDK Update 1
  • October 2023 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the October 2023 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

October 2023 GDK Update 6

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

Issue fixes

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

October 2023 GDK Update 5

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed an issue in xCurl where crashes could occur when concurrent calls were made to curl_multi_cleanup and curl_multi_info_read for the same multi handle.

October 2023 GDK Update 4

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed a regression in XCurl where specifying CURLOPT_INFILESIZE on a curl request with the Transfer-encoding: chunked header would cause the request to not send the final empty chunk and ultimately fail.

Video

Fixed an issue where Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs could crash due to a missing delay loaded dependency.

System

Fixed an issue in the task queue to avoid a race condition that could cause a title to crash with a failfast error when the title is suspended.

October 2023 GDK Update 2

Issue fixes

PlayFab

Fixed an issue that could result in a "dll not found" error message when attempting to reference PlayFab.Core or PlayFab.Services libraries.

Packaging

Fixed an issue where the MicrosoftGame.Config editor would delete certain fields if the user added them to the file using a text editor.

October 2023 GDK Update 1

Issue fixes

System

Fixed an issue where protocol activation wasn't properly handling relative paths to the target executable.

Streaming

Fixed several issues where the title could crash or the streaming client properties would report no data if a streaming client connected while the XGameStreamingInitialize API was executing.

Xbox services

Fixed a race condition in WinHttpWebsocket teardown on suspend that could cause the title to crash or stop responding.

Fixed an issue where using XSAPI or PlayFab with trace logging enabled at information or verbose levels could cause the title to crash.

Fixed an issue that could cause the title to crash when calling PeoplehubService::DeserializeTitleHistory for certain locales.

October 2023 GDK

Notifications

Visual Studio support

The GDK currently supports building game projects with the Visual Studio 2017 compiler and linker toolset (version v141) either from the command line or from the Visual Studio 2019 or Visual Studio 2022 IDEs.

Support for building game projects with the v141 toolset will be removed in the October 2024 version of the GDK.

Issue fixes

Commerce

Fixed an issue with XStoreQueryAssociatedProductsAsync where the maxItemsToRetrievePerPage parameter wasn't returning the correct number of results when 26 or more products were requested.

Known issues

Middleware

Systems using the GDK Unity Package that have only the public GDK installed will have missing DLL issues in Unity projects until the next plugin release.

For more information and a quick fix, see Plugin fails to load DLLs/Tools for public GDK installs Issue #93 microsoft/gdk-unity-package.

This issue is resolved, make sure you are using the latest GDK Unity Package.

June 2024 GDK Update 2 Public Release

June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) release notes

Introduction

Welcome to the June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit release. You can use the GDK to develop games that can be certified and approved for release on Windows 11 PCs and Windows 10 PCs.

About this document

We have organized this document into the following sections.

• What's new
• Release notes:
  • June 2024 GDK Update 2
  • June 2024 GDK Update 1
  • June 2024 GDK
• Documentation

What's new in the June 2024 Microsoft Game Development Kit

• The GDK is released in two types: Major (focused on features, three times a year) and Updates (focused on fixes, as often as needed).
• To view the full What's New section, see the online version of What's New.

June 2024 GDK Update 2

Notifications

System

The XGameSave RPC transfer buffer now has a maximum size of 500 KB instead of being based on blob size. This minimizes memory defragmentation.

Issue fixes

Networking

Fixed a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) reception regression that incorrectly allocated temporary queue buffers from system partition memory instead of the title partition when title-provided buffers were unavailable. This regression potentially reduced download performance under default XNetworkingConfigurationSetting values.

June 2024 GDK Update 1

Notifications

Input

The GameInput API now breaks in when a debugger is connected, and it detects a possible large number of reference leaks. This is triggered only in development scenarios and is a signal that your game might be leaking references and could deadlock input.

Issue fixes

PIX for Windows

Fixed an issue that caused PIX to crash after adjusting the font size when using a non-EN culture.

Game Chat 2

Fixed an issue that caused a crash in Game Chat 2 that could occur after the user changed their console language setting.

June 2024 GDK

Breaking changes

Xbox services

The Xbox.Services.API.C extension library (XSAPI) now has an additional .dll dependency, libHttpClient. This .dll must be included in the game's shipped package and configured properly for XSAPI to function. When using the GDK with Visual Studio, the library is automatically loaded. For custom engines and other build systems, see guidance for XSAPI configuration in C/C++ Custom engine integration for PC: get started.

Issue fixes

Multiplayer

Fixed an issue where Microsoft Azure PlayFab Party could stop responding during shutdown.

Documentation

Offline documentation for the June 2024 release of the GDKX is installed on your development PC by the GDKX Setup program. After running Setup, the Help file for the GDKX (gdk.chm) is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft GDK\Documentation.

• The online GDKX documentation is at http://aka.ms/gdkonline.