More Active
Tuesday 17 June 2008 at 2:09 pm
Yea, with the last post about education. I decided maybe it was time for me to be a tad more active with my blog itself, Kind off get into the spirit of doing stuff. Not quite sure what I will mostly be posting about but I'm going to aim for at least 3 decent posts a week covering more than "I played WoW today lolz" which seems to have been my standard thus far.
I'll probably go along the path of my adventures in XNA and starting to learn how to program again from scratch, For no reason that I constantly feel like I skip basic topics in some languages because of my understanding of them in others. At times both a blessing and a curse, Anyway I created a pong clone in XNA (Gotta start with pong) and had massive problems porting it over to the 360 itself. Mostly due to aspect ratio's and the XNA book I was reading citing the Safe zone to be 3%, Which is a complete falsehood and/or misprint as the safe zone is in actuality 30% at worst. Quite a difference between 3 and 30.
Another problem i encountered was the console itself returning the backbuffer size as 800x600 and the console actually running in 640x480 or various other resolutions depending on if I'd selected Pal-50 or Pal-60 and widescreen etc in the actual console settings (Same code running on both screenshots above, only difference was ones on the PC, others on the Console). This caused all sorts of scaling nightmares for me somehow that took me forever to fix. Mostly because my onscreen text was always correctly positioned centre screen, Where as my paddles where just all over the place. Turned out to be because in my Paddle Object i was basing the safe screen zone of the client window size. and the On-screen text of the actual backbuffer size. The console itself scales the back buffer to the correct size for display. But you can imagine i was using a safe zone of 640x480 (and various others) on a 800x600 canvas. the correct text was what probably caused me to take so long solving the problem but was also the solution for me in the end. After I'd ripped absolutely everything else out the game.
So that was my first venture into the land of XNA and the Xbox360 development. I will finish the pong game and upload it in the coming week/weeks, Especially now that I installed VC# 2005 and XNA onto the laptop and don't have to walk between rooms to test deployments to the console.
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