Back Up And Running

Thanks to my wonderful in-house tech support department (a.k.a. my wife) I'm back up and running with a completely fresh and new hard drive and no viruses.

I successfully have both rectangle vs rectangle collision detection as well as per pixel collision detection test working in-game. Now to get the per pixel working while a rotate transform is taking place, so everything checks out with the spinning O2 tank.

I've also gone back and reworked the animation and animation player classes. They were designed with the assumption that all sprites would be squares which is not the case, pretty much across the board in "Deep Blue". But I still have another modification to make to it so my animation sprite sheets are not required to be laid out completely horizontally...like in the platformer sample.

So, more to do, but stuff is blowing up now and that's usually a good thing.

Visual Studio Malware???

So, I've been fighting a virus on my computer and I used an anti-malware software to get rid of it. It did a full scan, found a number of things and removed them.

And now....I can't seem to build ANYTHING in Visual Studio Express. Every time I "build" it acts like it does a successful build, even to the point that the UI shifts into "debug" mode but no window with the game actually comes up to display anything.

And it no longer seems to be creating an exe in the debug folder of the project. I've tried this with other "sample" projects and even a "raw" new project where I should have gotten the light blue screen.....but nothin.

I've uninstalled/redownloaded/and reinstalled Visual Studio Express but no change.

So, now what?!

Version Problem Solved...sort of

It took a bit more browsing through the XNA forums to find a 'solution' to my XACT audio problem. Here are a few important things to note.

First, the 'version' of the project is not entirely dictated by the 'version' of Visual Studio that you're currently using. The project is versioned when you start the project. I began "Deep Blue" with Game Studio 2.0 but then upgraded to 3.0 when it was mandated by the rules.

The problem with that is that XACT 3.0 wasn't compatible with Game Studio 3.0...even though they were a part of the same download...mmm...yeah....but anyhow. They fixed the compatibility issue with Game Studio 3.1 so I upgraded my version of Game Studio. But that didn't mean I upgraded the project...which remained at version 3.0, even though I was developing it in 3.1 at the time. So I had to manually 'upgrade' my project to 3.1.

Solved.....right? Not quite.

Even after doing this I got some really odd version errors on the audio so I decided to open XACT 3.0 and rebuild the sound banks again. But that didn't seem to help. I confirmed that the files were being overwritten (updated), but it didn't seem to have any effect.

I had to manually delete the compiled sound bank files and THEN rebuild the sound banks to finally get the project to compile without error. So now it all works, but it still doesn't make much sense.

Version Problems...

See, and I was going to make this post about how cool and awesome the XACT audio tool was for sound engineering. But instead, this post is about how screwy version control and backwards compatibility can be.

I'm having some odd version problems with XACT and Game Studio 2.0 or 3.0 (it's hard to tell which is causing the problems). The XACT audio tool is what enables you to create sound banks for XNA games.

At this point, one solution (sort of) appears to be to make a new sound bank with all the sounds in it. Which believe it or not is a little more complex than simply including a bunch of wav files in one collection. And honestly, that was supposed to be the 'cool' part...unless I have to do the whole thing twice.

Bottom line...or as much as I can tell right now...is that I began this project with Game Studio 2.0, which came with the XACT 2.0 tool. Then I had to upgrade to Game Studio 3.0 (all XNA submissions must be in 3.0 at this time). Well Game Studio 3.0 came with the XACT 3.0 audio tool...HOWEVER...the 3.0 audio tool was not compatible with Game Studio 3.0. (Yeah, I have no idea how THAT passed any kind of QA). This is an error they fixed in Game Studio 3.1. So you'd think everything would be cool (now). But it looks like (judging from the XNA forums), that if you start a project with an older version of Game Studio...it won't accept newer file format of XACT.

Ok, so worst case is that I have to recreate all the audio I just finished in XACT 3.0....back in the 2.0 version since any sound bank created with XACT 2.0 seems to work fine. ACCEPT for the funny thing call the XACT auditioning tool which is another app that runs in the background along with XACT that enables you to listen to the sounds you're creating in XACT. Without the auditioning tool...you can't hear a single thing of what you're creating. The totally cool and awesome part now is...the 3.0 version of the auditioning tool deleted/overwrote the 2.0 version. So now, if I try to use the XACT 2.0 tool to recreate the sounds....I can't listen to a single thing I'm doing.

So....a bit stuck on audio at the moment. Still searching the forums for a better answer than the one I've found so far.

My First Game Component

I'm very pleased to say I've completed my first independent Game Component. I created a messaging system for common message types. So far that includes floating score bubbles and sinking messages that I'll use in "Deep Blue" for things like "Ready, Dive!" or "Level 1".

It's a message system that is complete independent of the rest of the game code. It's easily integrated into any future game with....I think 2 lines of code. It's also something I can easily build new message types into with simple additional classes.

Things are moving along pretty well.

Unity 3d is now FREE

A 3d engine that's caught a lot of attention lately from the likes of EA and myself is Unity 3d. Mr. Chris Griffith at work showed it off a couple of years ago. At that time it was Mac only, which didn't help us out much, but it's come a long way since then.

The MMO "Fusion Fall" was created with it, as is the upcoming Tiger Woods Online among other games. Anyhow...the point to this post...as the title would suggest is that they have opted to drop the $200 license fee for the indy license.

The other cool thing is that they "Unity" has reported that it is...or will soon be...compatible with the 360. Sweet! The only real question is whether or not the 360 export will be included with the indy version.

I'll definitely be playing around with it sometime in the future, and researching it as a possible 3d engine.

Signed In!

Another little victory. I've now programmed in Xbox Live sign in to the beginning of the game, and it's even pulling in the players Xbox Live Gamertag name and displaying it where "Player 1" was being shown.

I know, it's nothing huge...but a nice little step none-the-less.