Okay, it seems the Xbox360 project has been and will be on hold for a very very long time. I decided to release some shots of it as it was in July 2007. If we ever get this thing finished it might even be on a totally different platform.

The XNA team have released the 2.0 beta. I haven’t touched our XNA demo code after Assembly but I have been planning starting the work on it sometime in the beginning of the year 2008.

The next version of XNA game studio has been announced. There’s a bunch of improvements and it will be interesting to see it in action later this year.

In the meanwhile the XNA demo will be on hold and I’m planning doing something with the GP2X again. Also, TMDC again in November!

We have decided not to release the demo after all.. There just is too much stuff missing and badly unfinished. Also, problems with running the demo on the xbox didn’t help either. If we loaded all the parts in memory when starting the demo they all lagged. We also tried to load each part after the previous one. We got the first part to run nicely but latter parts run slower and slower even when we tried to free the memory used by the earlier parts.

We will release the demo later with all the stuff we had originally planned.

The decision was very hard. This sucks.

We now have the demo running (or half-a-demo) on the xbox but we have some problems with it. A short lag about every one or two seconds. Possibly something to do with the garbage collector..

The deadline draws nearer and nearer.. We are trying to finish all the parts (with placeholders at least) by tomorrow and then use the time left to fine tune and adding details.

I really recommend checking out the Particle 3D sample from the XNA website. I’ve been using it as the base of our particle engine and for a piece of example code it is very powerful and easily extendable.

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I finally started the VisualStudio project for the demo today.. And I have to say I got quite much done for the demo framework. I wrote a Timeline class that handles the initialization and running all the effects/parts. It also controls the music playback. Then I made a DemoComponent -class (inherits GameComponent) which all the demo parts will inherit. The DemoComponent extends GameComponent by adding multiple starting/ending points for the Timeline.

So, all effects/parts will be initialized in Timeline and all starting/ending points will be set. Then all effects know when they should be drawn. So far I have only done small tests and I’m sure there are important stuff still missing, for example the rendertargets. The Timeline could then handle transitions as well.

The win32 version now uses BASS for music playback because it is much more flexible than the XNA booboo. I can now rewind/fastforward the music or slow it down etc. All the effects are bound to the music timer so I can jump anywhere in the demo. This is very helpful when doing all the syncs..

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Yay,

Portal Process and Excess are together doing something for the XBOX360. Be sure to read their blog also. I have to agree to all the stuff mentioned in their first post about the current XNA version.

It is interesting to see if more groups pop up.

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A soundtrack in a demo is a must.

I’m currently prototyping miscellaneous stuff and just did my first audio playback test with the XNA. Standard wave files can be played on both win32 and XBOX360 environments. Uncompressed wave files tend to be huge and luckily it is possible to compress the sounds. On win32 the only option is ADPCM and for the XBOX there is XMA. It would be nice if MP3 or OGG were supported..The tune I tested for compression was originally a variable bit rate MP3 10MB in size. Uncompressing it into wave produced a 54MB file. Again compressing the wave file using the XACT tool with default compression settings (128 samples per block for ADPCM and quality level 60 for XMA) resulted in a 15MB file with ADPCM and a 7MB file with XMA compression. With quality value of 100 the XMA compressed file was 20MB in size. I didn’t do any proper listening tests yet so I don’t know what the worst quality sounds like.

The XACT tool may be confusing at the first glance but there is a good example in the documentation. However there is no compression used in the example. It is pretty straightforward to do: add a new compression preset, adjust the quality settings if needed and finally set the wave bank to use the new compression preset.

The actual playback is a very simple thing to do. Just load the sound and wave bank files and play the cue. Again, there is a good example in the documentation. It took less than 10 minutes to configure and compress the wave file and to make it play in the XNA application.

There is one important feature missing from the XNA. There is no way to know at what position is the sound clip currently playing. This information is crucial when the demo uses the music to sync all the effects (not the actual sound data but the playing time). One solution is to start a timer at the same time with the music and hope it won’t go out of sync. I have to test this later.

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