Xbox 360 Day One

So today I finally took the dive and bought the new, remodelled Xbox 360 250 GB to begin testing the Shadowdawn Genesis game engine on the actual target platform.  I didn’t intend to be up this late, as I wanted to go to bed early and take off running tomorrow.

Problem #1: Getting the damn thing to compile.  This was a nightmare in every possible way.  For some reason Visual Studio felt like giving me a different error every time I hit build, even when I was not changing anything.  The main problem was in how I read my game’s data files… apparently the .dll that reads these files is completely different from the Windows version and Xbox version.  Which means that the entire processing code I had written for the game so far had to be cloned into a set compatible with Xbox 360.

Problem #2: XACT again… it really is a neat idea, but the documentation and project manager tool itself seem to skip over some extremely vital information.  First off, the Build command, one of the most fundamental commands, does not seem to do anything.  I have yet to see it generate usable wave or sound banks.  I have always had to compile the project from the command line to even get a semi-usable version.  It gets even worse when you see the actual .xap file… it uses a pretty inconsistent source directory formatting so you almost always have to clean up after the program.  And the last but not least problem is WHERE do you put these compiled files?  You can’t add them to your Visual Studio project, and the .xap file seems to have little effect on where it looks for the three important compiled banks.  I’m not even sure how I ended up getting it to work in the end, because I tried the same thing twice with exactly the same steps and it worked the second time (the first time, the Xbox 360 didn’t seem interested in downloading the music files automatically)

Problem #3 This is going to be one of those ongoing things I have to work on as a programmer and an artist.  Though it wasn’t as bad as I was imagining, there is definitely a few unwanted “Garbage Collections” in my playtest, which essentially kills framerate for a second.  It looks awful no matter how hard you try to shrug it off.  The last is that for some reason, the Xbox 360 seems to have a lot richer color depth than my pc for the graphics, so while I feel what I have on my Windows version is modest, the Xbox 360 version’s graphics are way saturated.  It’s definitely time to tone some of that down.