Thursday morning I left my apartment late for work. I got in the office by 11:20 AM. Trying to be well rested because I knew that I was going to have a night of last minute fixes.. as it was the last major milestone for the project.
It turned out to be a bit more tiring than expected. The team basically worked 40 hours straight. Pretty painful to stitch together pieces of horrible code with duct tape.. cheap cheap tricks, globals everywhere, special cases, hopeful guesses.
At one point I had a problem with the playback of the background music.. a new track, deep into some complex level of the game, would not play.. but only on the actual burned DVD, not on the debug-station (which only emulates the DVD).
The XDK doesn’t really give a good example on how to do asynchronous load, I fiddled quite a bit with it and eventually got it going (thanks also to the on-line help of Mr.Rince !). And still, somehow I’d get into a bump between finishing to load and playing back the just loaded track. Eventually my boss tried to put the audio files on the fast portion of the DVD (the sectors towards the border of the DVD) and that apparently solved the playback problem 8)

Amazing how complicated also the XBox Live thing is.. it kept us trying to fit the game into the complicated subtleties of the server: ranked matches, standard matches, stats to write, voice chat to support. Microsoft definitely did quite a work with Live (which I only discovered with the 360, but I think it’s not too different from the one on the first XBox). A lot of effort for MS, which requires a lot of effort for the developers.. even just to understand how the system is meant to work. Not necessarily technical matters.. for example, how are standard match and a ranked match different ? How does a game lobby work in ranked matches ? What happens to the players in one console where another local player joined some game session on-line ?
And then the rankings, writing the stats, reading the stats, querying the database to find players that match one’s skills. A lot of asynchronous operations, a lot of added complexity to a game.

Time to really sleep now. This weekend I don’t have to work.. wow !!

zzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized