Saturday 14 July 2007

Crunch session - Part I

We are back from vacation and decided to have a demomaking "crunch session" (hello EA!) this weekend. Only a few weeks to go before Assembly is upon us and we are, to put it mildly, "a bit behind schedule".

It turns out that the CPU of the Xbox360 was slower than expected. A lot slower. It doesn't really have a lot of memory either, so we have to look into ways of getting around that. There were some CPU code that we thought we could easily move over to the GPU, but it turns out it wasn't easy at all. In fact it was so hard that we skipped the whole thing.

KMK and Svok coding while Gloom types up the demo plan on the Mac. Oh the irony.

While most of us are carrying on in Oslo, AM is in Stavanger and contributing via the internet (oh bless those wonderful tubes!). Our third coder might join us in a few hours as well, so we are hoping to kick it up a notch if he arrives. Music-wise, the basic structure and elements are in place, but the tune is a huge mess right now.

We've learned something else since last time, and that is that it is really annoying that you have to be online with the Xbox360 to start the "XNA Game Launcher". Now, this might not sound like a big deal, but it is when you are trying to run code on the box in a place with restricted internet access (like the University of Oslo).

Also; we find it quite funny that the place you run XNA software from is called "Demos and More". :) We will be back with more later on. Cheerioh!

Signed,
All of us

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

yea, the required Xbox Live connection for XNA to launch is a real drag. In some cases I have just taken a mule laptop with a wifi card and made a bridge connection.