New Slim is Slim

It is also quiet. It also got me really annoyed when i first connected it up.

Cos it told me to insert a Disk, a Disk that did not come with the new 4gb Xbox Slim. How can this be? So i went to the net to search for answers. After 10 minutes i was none the wiser. So decided to pull all th cables and re-attach them, This time i would not connect the Kinect connector (what a mouthful!).

That was it, it now booted up correctly and elt me set it up and recover my gamertag as well. Woohoo! But why oh why did it have such a none descriptive message on the bos. Are you telling me that i am the only person that would autometically connect up all the cables i have ? I just don't believe it. I think Ms missed that one.

So anyone out there that initially sets up their Xbox slim and it asks for a Disk, just go disconnect your Kinect and reboot.

Good luck

My Xbox has Died

It is a sad day today. I feel really bad, little things going awry and the last straw was my Elite going 3 Red rings on me.  Maybe i have been so busy carting it around from my bedroom workplace to the living room of late. Maybe i am asking too much for you to power my Kinect as well, i just don't know.

I do know that it will cost me a whopping 99 bucks to get it looked at by MS. Boo!

But the thing is, it can be amazing how unlucky a single decision can make stuff. Let me explain....

Today i went out to Walmart and Gamestop. I wanted to by Lips for my Xbox so we can have some loud Karaoke to go along with the raucous Kinect fun. Walmart did not have it so, off we go to Gamestop. Yes, they have it, woohoo! Now while i was out i had also sort of decided that i really should be a more dedicated Xbox for the living room area. So i wouldn't have to keep moving my Xbox around etc. I decided not to buy it at gamestop cos i wanted to check prices online, were there any good deals etc..

Well as it happend as soon as i got home i grabbed my Xbox, which had been left on in the bedroom running A Shooter as a server for my high score sharing. So i turned it off and unplugged it, as i walked out of the bedroom with it there was a clank as the power cord hit the side of the Xbox. Ouch i thought, but it'll be ok. It seems i was wrong and that clang was a fatal touch of Red Ringiness.

So i have since got a little annoyed cos i could have bought the Xbox Slim while i was out. Then i would not have even unplugged mine from the bedroom, and as you can tell. Everything would have worked out great, haha!

So now i really need the new Xbox to play Lips and Kinect on.

I have found this whole scenario very depressing, and i feel like an old friend has decided to unfriend me from facebook or something. My life is now not as complete as it was.

Still.....

At least i can buy a new friend tomorrow, and the new one is gonna be slimmer ;)

Laters

A shooter Update Now on Xbox

YAY! Thanks have to go to my Peers who got this minor update through in about 4 days or so.

Now there are a number of minor tweaks and fixes, the most obvious one being shooting the Purple Asteroid to retrieve your powerup from inside it. I hope this makes the frist several levels much more enjoyable for new players.

don't forget about the competition ending this Sunday evening, and you can check out my videos for playthru's of both level 5 and 9. although watching them will teach you how to also play the lower levels.

Good luck

Da Voodoochief

Screenshots, so how many?

How many screenshots do ya think would be a good number ?
I guess it will depend on what ya want them for eh? Good question. Well i need 4 for the XBox Dashboard when my game is live, so people can see soemthing about the game. I also need some for my Press Pack.

So lets see, that really means the question is how many for the press pack? I was thinking maybe 12-20. Seems like a lot 20, but then if several review sites want to feature my game (c'mon, it could happen!). Then i want them to have a choice, so not all sites show the same exact gameplay pictures. Hmm. So 20 seems good. Total then is 24 pictures.

So how many should i take before wittling them down to just 24?

This is where i went OTT i think. I took 300 screenshots as i played through the game, from the start of the game to the end. though now i realise i have no menu or title page screenshots, haha! Then i had to go through them and pare it all down. 24 is a low number compared to 300. This has taken me a while, but i have managed to reduce the number eventualy. Though it now resides at 49 screenshots. BAH! There is no way i can get that number down. Those pictures each tell a story of one craft battling against the multitudes and winning. DANG, now i realise i need pictures of multiplayer, lol. Guess i am not done with this yet after all :|

More after my family and I get back from a quick vacation doing some RVing out at El Mirage and riding our off road bikes.

G'night

Dual Xbox workplace

I have been really excited this last week with my work area. It is in the spare room of my house and takes up way too much room. I know i need an office etc, but that is currently a dream i cannot afford. Below are a couple of photos of the area i work in. The middle monitor doubles usage for the second PC i have stacked under my main dev PC.

It has been a real pleasure working on two xboxes. I know the time has come to hand one back to my mate Paul, and i shall miss it dearly.

shh.. Don't lok under the table at all those wires and cabling.. it's so busy!

Laters

Intro Video On the Xbox Issue

I got home tonight and spent some good times trying hard to Code 4 Kris Steeles new game Hypership Out of Control. He just got it through peer reveiw and Bam, one of the reveiwers finds a code 4. This is serious business as it in theory just went onto the new releases list I have no idea how that will lay out, i sure hope he gets it on the list when the game is fixed. In comparison to Kris's problem mine are basic.

So i wanted to get my new intro video onto the Xbox, to see it in all it's glory... Only i had to wait while Hypership was being tested (i think my game was crashing others, so i left it up). The waiting mean't i got some other coding jobs done, so all good there.

However when i got the intro onto the Xbox it was al choppy. ARGH! so i went straight to the video editor and worked on smaller less Mbps Wmvs. In fact i have ended up spending more than an hour and a half, thanks mostly to the export times of Video. sometimes they would generate corrupted stuff. Others they worked great on my PC. Then when i put them, in the game and ran from the solution, they looked choppy and crap. It took me quite some time to realise that when streaming from your PC, it is crap. Only when i decided to work on a trial mode feature and launched my game fram the Dash did i see that the video was in fact alright. which means i have wasted sooo much time tonight :(

So the lesson is,
Don't believe all ya see.
Video running through the debugger will almost certainly look awful.

g'night

The Force Unleashed for Xbox

I have ben watching my son play The force Unleashed now for a few weeks, helping him when he gets stuck etc. What a wonderful game it is. so complete in so many ways. What everyone must realise is that so very few of us will ever get to work on such a great title.

I have been very lucky and worked on some big titles, but to be honest most of them have not entranced me the way this one does. It sets a bar of quality for full price titles. It has so much in it from a detail perspective and the storyline is epic. Truly a wonderful work of art (oops did i say art, lol).

What is so special?
1. The story is excellent
2. It is star wars, thru and thru
3. The controls are complictaed, but only end up that way
4. there is an excellet tutorial/training segment
5. Enemies etc move in a familiar way
6. The scene and landscapes are truly stunning (oh man i said truly again!)

I have listed on a few things, but oh man.. the number of people that must of worked on this title must be staggering.

Good job LucasArts i applaud you. now time for bed, that is enough TFU for one night haha (yeah, i am playing it now too :S)

G'night

Xbox and Xna is nice

So i got to work a bit on some bugs today for A Shooter. It was nice to solve some Xbox specific bugs. I love the way I connect to the xbox and can live debug so easily. In my professional capacity it isn't quite so easy to work with professional debug stations. So i am loving this.

Last night I did manage to play through the whole of the shooter. It was good to finish the game, however it did crash rigth at the end. After some debugging today I found it was the old save game that was loading in and breaking the new save data format. DOH! I have done that before and that is why my saved data has a version number with it, so it can easily be rejected :S.. Version numbers in such things are a great thing to do, if ya not using one. I suggest you change that now. I can for instance change my format and include a reformatter in a new version which would upgrade the save data to the new format. Very important bit of info that!

Oh, cos it crashed, i do not know what my score was.. ARGH!

Well g'night.