An Idea of Game Packs

Posted in XNA, Zune on July 01, 2008 at 11:51pm.
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According to the Rules of XNA, you are only allowed to call the Run method of the Game class once. No matter how many Game objects you instantiate, you only can call Run once lest you get an InvalidOperationException. However the other day I began to wonder how one could work around this.

So I set off with my Zune attempting such a feat. After a few hours and some fun little tricks, I was able to ping-pong between a bootstrapper application (no XNA used), a game launcher application (XNA GUI interface), and any number of Zune games I wanted. What this means is that I can create a single game package for the Zune that includes any number of games and the user never has to actually reboot the Zune.

However this post isn’t really about the Zune at all. That was just the first platform I tried it on. My thoughts extend beyond this, though. What about multi-game packs for Xbox 360? You could argue, “But Nick, you can just make each ‘game’ a piece of one big game and not deal with all this rigamarole!” and to that I say “Sure, you could.” However my argument is this: What if you (and others) create a bunch of standalone games for the Xbox 360 and release them. Now it’s the future and let’s say you want to bundle them all up and release it as a single pack. To meet the “one big game” criteria, you have some decent work tying it all together and making sure it all plays nice. What I’m proposing, though, would allow you to just input the previously built games, build the launcher UI, and you’re done. No source changes required for the original games

Of course I still have to test on the Xbox 360, but if it worked on the Zune (which runs a similar version of the .NET CF) I have to assume it would also work on the Xbox 360. I might give a prototype a try and see how it goes. Make a pack of mini games and submit it to the XNA Community Games beta or something. Who knows. I just found it to be an interesting idea that actually is possible. What to do with it, if anything, is a whole new discussion.

My Creatures

June 27, 2008 at 6:55pm.
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I did download the Spore Creature Creator demo. No, I will not spend $10 on a demo. The free demo is just as good. I’ll save my $10 for the real game.

Anyway, I whipped up a couple of little creatures and figured why not share them with the world? They’re nothing all that special, but I think they’re each cool. So here are those magical PNG files you can just drag into the game to import them. I would love to see a read up from the developers on who thought of that and exactly how it all works.

 

 

Research

Posted in Industry on June 27, 2008 at 1:04pm.
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I’ve started playing around with searching for trademarks, patents, and copyrights for various games and ideas to see what is and isn’t covered already. So far nothing really interesting (I just mainly wanted to share those links for others to use), but I did find one curious item. The name “Tower Defense” is actually trademarked by a company in South Korea.

Seems interesting. It was only granted recently (June 3, 2008) but I wonder how long it will stick. Afterall, if the company doesn’t enforce their trademark against the literal dozens of games online using “Tower Defense” in the name, can the trademark actually be upheld? I’m no lawyer but I remember being told that the key with trademarks is that if you don’t enforce them, you lose them. Seems that this companyhas some work to do if that is the case.

Now back to random searching.

Edit: It also appears that Valve owns the patent for generating virtual eyes.

Zune Performance

Posted in XNA, Zune on June 20, 2008 at 11:37am.
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Michael Klucher, a program manager on the XNA team, made a great blog post this morning about Zune performance in regards to the differences between the 30GB model (generation 1) and the 4/8/80GB models (generation 2).

It’s great to finally have an answer, even if it’s that the Zune is being limited to save battery power. While great for the general Zune media functionality, it’d be nice for games to have more power. So in the usual rally of “customers drive software”, I’ve created a Connect suggestion that games should be able to request that these features be turned off so as to gain those clock cycles and faster refresh rate. You can go ahead and see there here: https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=352193&SiteID=226.

If you want to make Zune games and want to see this get changed, please register at that site and vote on the issue to let Microsoft know that this is important to us, especially the developers looking to start making more and more advanced games for the Zune where every cycle is valuable.

I’m a Convert

June 19, 2008 at 10:37pm.
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I’m switching over! To FRAPS that is. A while back I had a discussion in IRC about screen capture and was told that FRAPS would give me a better video quality and let me easily record my game’s audio. Initially I was skeptical because I had already tried tons of screen capture software and was really happy with HyperCam. But then I tried FRAPS…

It’s really nice :). HyperCam is still far superior for tutorials and things because it’s more lightweight making it better for long videos. Not to mention FRAPS only works for games. But if you need to record some gameplay, better believe that FRAPS is a great way to capture your video and audio.

I then usually will take that output (a rather large AVI file) into VirtualDub with the Xvid Codec and shrink it down. Usually it turns a 500+MB video into a 20MB video. It’s that good.

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