Missed a Month.. and why

It has finally ended up being a month since my last post into this Blog.

I was doing very well with my daily posts until that time, so now i am going to explain some of the reasons there has been no posting, and some ideasof why there will probably be very few more, until maybe things change again... there is always change of course. Sometimes however away from developing games.

So what happened on the 15th ?
Several things happened or were in the proces of happening. I will describe a few of them in no particular order of importance (i think it took all these reasons and more to stop me).
1. Was in the middle of upgrading Berzerkatron to Xna 4.0. this should be something fairly straight forward, but it isn't. It wasn't realy designed to be either, which is a pity. However the real reason this is on my list is the fact that doing this kind of work and research smacks of my day job. The job where i write games occasionally, but lately have ben converting games from one sku to another. This kind of work is NOT creating games, and that is why i was on Xna. It would be interesting to see how my time would have worked out if the upgrade had been automatic, or even if a little upgrade script had been provided.
2. When i am coding my Xna games, i spend an inordinately large amount of time doing it, though in all honesty i think more time is spent on balance and level design than actual coding. Spending all this time means that my other creative endeavours always end up on the back seat. I figured that if i wasn't coding Xna games (too much fun), then i could be pursuing my other ideas.
3. February is exactly 1 year from when i sent off my book to 17 places. they said they would get back to me in a time frame anything from 60 days to 10 months. That time is now used up and expired. So it must be time to try something else, i still believe in my childrens book and how helpful they can be to teach kids to read and more importantly find enjoyment in reading. So how can i be writing games while needing to spend time on these books.
4. It was a break for the holidays and i got ill off and on the whole time. So taking time off to be ill seemed like a good thing.
5. I always wanted to Blog more about the development work here at work at Mass Media, only... My boss and i also think some of the other employees are a little scared i might reveal something that we have signed a non disclosure abuot. So i feel really restricted on what i can say. Which realy bums me out. We do all this great Sony Home stuff and yet, i can hardly say a word, no reveals, no secrets.. nothing. So with that pressure i have hardly ever mentioned what i do, apart from some stories etc I wrote a long time ago, and thoroughly enjoyed, as i hope you folks did.
6. Work is gonna kick my butt more. Yeah, work pressure has mounted, i am now working a 6 day week and this is tough on my family as well as me. With this reduced home time, it would be hard to code much anyway. Still the poducts we are working on are gonna make people very happy.

So whats next ?
I think i will be altering my Web page for SorceryGames once i get something to edit it with, my hard drive crash 6 weeks ago really put a pain into doing a lot of stuff i was really organised to do. Once it is locked up, i will be working on my new web site, which should be http://www.ab4k.com/ That stands for Adventure Books For Kids. I could not get the 'C' for children, bah!  I need artists if any of you out there think you are talented enough for childrens adventure books. I need approximately 22 pictures per book. I am going for high quality, though i am not too concerned about art style so much as quality level. So if you are interested, please drop me a line at voodoochief@sorcerygames.com.

As for this Blog, as it is my Sorcery Dev blog, I think i need to take a break from it. which saddens me cos it also means i need to take a break from my fellow Xblig peers. this group of indivduals has really impressed me in the last year, through their dedicationa nd commitment to not only help themselves, but also to help each other, and also me. I do not know of any community like it and I certainly hope i can get my books going to a more sedate pace (hours commited by me a week), and then hopefully i can come back and get on with more Xblig codiing myself. My one man army is suffering from not enough hours in a day.


Special Mesage to Xblig Devs,
Fellow Xbligers, you know you can find me on twitter, i canot leave the community, it is too cool. So if you need a reveiw of a game done, i will still try very hard to do these. Though i will not be going and lokoing around for stuff to reveiw. Instead i will rely on people tweeting about needing one done, or just plain DM me, i would love to keep up with what everyone is producing.

So for now, i have to say bye.. I hope this will only be for a short time.

Da Voodoochief (Rob)

new VertexBuffer() Xna3.1 -> Xna4.0

My latest errors seem to revolve a lot around vertex buffer api changes. There is  nice blog post here by Shawn Hargreaves.
Post about Vertex Buffer Changes

simply put though you remove your VertexDeclaration lines of code and just put 'typeof(RoundLineVertex)' the declaration in the second parameter of the VertexBuffer call, like these following two lines of code.
vb = new VertexBuffer(device, typeof(RoundLineVertex), numVertices * bytesPerVertex, BufferUsage.None);

// vdecl = new VertexDeclaration(device, RoundLineVertex.VertexElements);
 
After going through that it was very easy to change the VertexBuffer setups... Only now i have IndexBuffer to sort out. I did not write this original code and so have no real working knowlegde of the finer points required to make this stuff work. However I hope it wil be fairly straight forward once i under what has changed in the API. I understand what the buffer is for, only not whats changed at the moment.

Laters

Blooming fixed some more Xna3.1 -> Xna4.0

So i had 28 erros, ALL of them pertaining to the Bloom component. Interesting. I know by experience that this is not the last of the errors. They are just being masked by the current issues. So i was not surprised when i fixed the Bloom to see a new selection of errors, 48 in total.

So fixing the Bloom was easy. I just compared the New 4.0 sample to what i had and copied over the changes. I would have just copied verbatim, but i knew i made several small changes to the Bloom and i did not want to do that again. This process only took about 5 minutes anyway.

So now onto my new Errors which include
does not conatin a definition for 'MinimumVertexShaderProfile'
and
VertexElementMethod does not exist

These are all to do with Roundline which i am actually not using at the moment in this game. I may remove it for now. I will bring it back when i want to use it (gonna be used for the Menu button descriptions I hope!)

So ever forward we go.

Now tomorrow night is my works party, i am sure i will not be posting then :)

G'night

Xna3.1 -> Xna 4.0 Solving missing types

So i had 158 errors and the most obvious one was the mising definitions for certain types like..
Vector2
Vector3
Vector4
Rectangle

To solve this issue i created a brand spanking new Solution and opened it up. As the problem appeared to be mising references i started by opening up the referecnes for the new project, then comparing them with the ones in my broken project. Immediatly i saw i was missing a couple of very important reference files.
Microsoft.Xna.Framework
System.Net
Obviously without these there is no way it can compile. You can just right click the References line and say 'Add Reference' then simply browse for these two to add them in.

Onto the next issues later..
Oh, i have about 28 errors left, Yay!

My Motivation is Lacking

Or put another way..
I do not yet have enough motivation to trawl through the myriad upgrading problems presented to me by the upgrade of Xna 3.1 to Xna 4.0 game Studio.

Still i feel every day more and more resolve, only not enough yet to actually boot up studio and stare at the current issues. Last night was close but lost out to spending time with my wife.

So the last week or so has still been busy for me. Playing lots of Cataclysm which i have been enjoying rather more than i expected. I have also been Kinect playing with Dance Central a lot. Boy is that my kinda game. In fact for me it is my GOTY. I even parted with 6 stinking dollars to get 2 downloadable dances, bah! I hate you Xbox (well not really). al i need now is to get a few more friends gamertags that actually play this game. Comparing my score to one friend is ok, but not enough darn it! I need to beat or be beaten by more people. It is also great cos my wife, son, and daughter also like to play this game. Truly awesome. I hope one day it will be able to actually play two at the same time (not like the take ya turns as it is now).

Maybe tonight will be the nigth i power up Dev Studio. I feel i have more resolve and also a few more tricky ideas of simple thing to try that i believe will solve my current issues. then onto new ones.

Laters

Wow has accounted for my last night or two

I do have to say that it seems like an easy choice to play Cataclysm instead of developing games. Though this would not normally be true, IF in fact i could develop my game. However with Berzerkatron being stuck being upgraded to 4.0 Xna, it is hard to get into at all.

So instead of slogging through error  after error, i play Wow with my Son and our friends. Easy choice right now.

G'night

So i removed the Avatar code (Xna 3.1->4.0)

After all the issues last night i have decided to remove all Avatar code for now. The chnages look just too all encompassing.and i need to get something going, if only for my sanity. Though sanity aside, it is always best to divide and conquer a problem if at all possible, and i am of the beleif that all problems can be broken down in some way.

So what happened after removal of the Avatar code? Well i ended up with 158 Errors, woohoo! Now there is something i can dig into, only i wonder how many more are hiding under these, as is usually the case.

So my next Error is... (unexpected)
"Error 1 The type or namespace name 'Vector2' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)"
I also get similar errors for Vector4 and Color (now i knew Color had changed but the Base Vector type declarations?). I guess it's time to see what i should be presenting these as.


After about 25 minutes searching, i have not found an answer. I have a couple of the Samples from the App hub and they seem to work perfectly. So i have no clue at the moment what is wrong with some of my types. I also see the same issue with 'Rectangle', i am sure one cure will fit most of these.
 
Off to work now. But if anyone knows what is wrong or even a lead, i would love to hear it.