Reduced Artwork, reduced excitement

Ok, reduced excitement is in direct relationship with heightened apprehension... Why am i apprehensive? I can tell you it is because this dreamland project is nearing completion, and with that comes the fear that I won't be able to publish it.

Whether the reason is because Peer reviewers don't want to review it, or maybe it is because i think they will discount it as it is ot a game application (and we all know how well those have done for sorcerygames lol). Maybe i am fearful that Microsoft will declare it as not an applicable application for XNA. The reason for this last one is because recently MS has declared this is not a video service, so projects must have soem game that the video supports. Here i am without a game, and a different kind of entertainment.. What will i face? That i will know soon enough i guess...

Big Fish in a small pond.. Or ?

Small fish in a big pond.

I have been around developing games for some time now. I have been a part of startups, and established compaines. I have generally been a smaller fish ina big pond as far as my games have been concerned, although soem of them have done immensely well, the companies i have worked for have always been a smaller fish. No Disney or EA here.

Here i am with Mass Media, another small fish that i have worked in for a long time now (14 years). Yes we were bought out at one stage by THQ and also let go a year ago when they were doing their cost cutting and laying everyone off.

Now we have re-established Mass Media and are doing well. As a premiere PS3 technology developer it seems our expertise are in demand, which is great. Btu.. ermm where was i going. Oh yeah. We are a small fish and are doing well with it. But we have an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. This new pond is called Playstation Home. We have some items out and a cool space called the Neptune suite. But what next ? We are currently developing a whole new area (i cannot disclose at this time , bah!), but is our internal investment going to be worth it ? Only time will tell, but also. The development area is so restrictive that a lot of our expertise is wasted... Do we carry on with this, well for now we will. Maybe even make enough to cover costs, I sure hope so of course.

But which would you choose?

The more interesting, or the more financially rewarding ?

Who takes the reigns?

Sometimes it is obvious who is taking the reigns of a project and moving it forwards. Other times it is not so obvious. Is it the person with authority who moves things forwards, or is it the person that gets stuff done?

This is a tough one and i am not sure i really know the answers. I am sure theya re all situational and personal.

In my current status i have no real design authority, yet i find myself doing a lot of the nitty gritty design work to keep my programmers productive. It is important to me to keep them productive, as it keeps the job more interesting, and i personally hate wasted development time. So here i am finding i am taking the reigns once more and fortunately to god effect it seems. So at least we have lots being worked on and done. Of course the nitty gritty i am doing could easily be described as the grunt work, the stuff that all games need, so i am designing nothing. But you would be amazed how much of this small stuff there is, and the small stuff that newer programmers just do not know. Luckily i guess i am old and wise, lol! Now that's funny!
Have a good'un

Debugging code

There are many ways to debug code, and some seem so primitive but are still usefull today. Ok some are not, like for example..
We used to use the border color on the old 8 bit machine to tell us what state we were in, or if something fatal happened it would change color to tell us how it got broken etc. Very useful piece of knowledge that. Of course nowadays the new machines do not have borders to color :o

What they generally do have though is configurations when building. This allows easy setting up of some debg code that could potentially slow down the game or code you are writing. But if you wrap it correctly in debug conditionals, then you will be fine. so during development you can error check just about everything without worrying about the performance loss.

I wish C# worked like the last paragraph, i would love to have the choice to error check my array bounds etc. Instead of it ALWAYS doing it for me, even when i do a full release version for the Xbox. Ahh well, it cannot be helped i guess. It seems we are too thick and need all the help we can get. BAH!

So i am also writing in Lua for the Sony Playstation. This crappy interpretive language has no good things in it as far as i can tell at the moment. It is also missing configuration directives of course. So today i came up with a waay to use debug code, and then simply have a parser that looks at the lua code and strips the debug stuff out of it if desired. Simple yet very effective, and now i can have debug again, woohoo!

Gnight

Tired Tonight, and why is that ?

It seems it is so easy to be more tired when things are not going your way. So that is how i feel tonight, but even so, after my full day of work and full night of karate going on. I feel tired, too darned tired to work on my own coding issues anyway.

Now tomorrow morning i do not anticipate being tired, so i am going to make a list tonight of what i need to do tomrrow, therefore making tomorrow more productive, and making me feel better about doing nuthin tonight.

Laters everyone

DXT Textures for XNA

Here is my follow up.

It is not all great for me, but then again, it is not all bad either.After following the advice i recieved from Nick and Zman I changed some of my textures to DXT, and waited to see what the complaint about size would be. sure enough it complained that i needed to have the texture multiples of 4 (ok, just one of them, the otehrs were ok). So off i went and altered the canvas appropriatly. This seemed to go through the pipeline fine until i tried to view the results on the PC (currently my Xbox is being replaced). The effect on the title page was terrible. The texture was somehow diminished and stretched off screen. So on with texting various ideas to see whatwent wrong...

Well it was easy enough to actually find out, as one of my first theories worked out, and that is that Textures for DXT needed to be powers of two, and in both X and Y sizes. This is a real downer for me, as it would mean lots of blank texture around my images as my textures are rectangular. This does however bring the size down to about 2.5 times the size of a jpg. So although it still blows my budget for memory it would still be workable with some more effort on my part.

So the facts in a more succinct way...

DXT compression works
DXT textures Must be powers of two in both height and width for the PC
DXT textures are 2.5 times the size of the jpg with a quality setting of 80
No idea currently if the Xbox will accept the DXT texture as just mutliples of 4 and now powers of 2.

This sucks so far. As i have a choice of reducing the size of all my pages, or reducing the number of pages. Both suck a lot!

Texture Textures, you are too fat!

So here i am getting very close to basic completion of my Dreamland book, and whaddya know. I am thrown a curve ball. It is a pretty large curve ball, but one that must be hit out of the ballpark, and soon.

I estimate i have a few hours of work left to make this application viable for release into the community for Peer review, or playtest. So i am a bit frustrated with soemthing i guess i should have tested much earlier than now.
Let me tell ya how it went...
I added in all the pages for the book (300 of them), and published a ccGame file (that is the file that one downloads to your xbox to install the game).
The ccGame once it was produced was a whopping 1.4GB, and seeing as how the limit on XNA titles is 150MB, i am in trouble. OUCH!
So i find that my jpg pages are being compressed to 10 times their jpg size. And i based all my calculations on them being around the jpg size (this is where i SHOULD have tested the pipeline out)
I then tried to see how come they are bigger and failed. The numbers did not add up. I knew that XNB files were supposedly well compressed, as nowadays compression techniques are really well understood and documented. So i had no choice. I read all the posts i could find in the XNA forums relating to texture formats etc. Lots of interesting reading there!

finally i had to post my own question, into a thread that was already quite similar. Within seconds of my post i got two answers of soemthing to try, something i had missed, mainly as i thought it defaulted to dxt compression on the textures anyway. So they instructed me on how to do that. Which is awesome! So after reprocessing the textures into DXT i find they are now only about 2.5 times the size of the jpg file.
This will of course still blow my total out of the water, and i haven't at this time seen what effect the DXT compression artifacting will have had on my texture.
As for size ,i can of course use smaller texture :( which will make me sad.

At this time, i do not quite know what to do. As i would have to reprocess all my 300 etxtures to make them multiples of 4 in both height and width to conform to DXT compression. This is a huge undertaking unless the process can be batched, and my debabilizer has run it's trial course :( BAH!

Time will tell how this goes. I'll update at some point.