Category Archives: XBLIG

The Outer Rim – Coming Soon!

The Outer Rim will be published in the XBLIG site next week. Very excited as we’ve all been working really hard over the past year or so to make sure you all get an enjoyable and fun game!

Big thanks to Jitter Physics for an excellent physics library. http://jitter-physics.com/wordpress/

Fixing Garbage Collection issues when developing for XNA and XBOX 360

The easiest way for a small indie company or hobbyist developer to develop for the XBox 360 is using the XNA tools from Microsoft. Microsoft have spent a substantial amount and time on the XNA product set.

The XNA framework is a low barrier way to games development. XNA development makes use of a XBox specific version of the .NET compact framework. However, this framework does of course have its issues. The libraries aren’t as complete as the non-compact version, etc.

The way memory works in the .NET framework and the Garbage Collector, the generations of collection, heap allocations and similar are well discussed in a number of locations (not least of which is the MSDN library) and so I shall not discuss those specifics here.

This post is about one specific issue – stalls due to garbage collection events firing off at an inconvenient time. At this point I would strongly recommend reading two excellent articles: Steve from StevePro Studios suggested that I investigate garbage collection when I was developing a game called “flap”. A simple sprite game that would stall every few seconds. Go check out Steve’s original articles . There are other articles out there that explain a fair bit of the inner workings of managed code. Boxing and unboxing is especially interesting.

Once you have read Steve’s original article you will understand that there are generally three values in the remote performance monitor to look out for.

  • Managed String Objects Allocated
  • Managed Objects Allocated
  • Boxed Value Types

So you understand how to use the remote performance monitor, you can see that a static scene is allocating 2000 strings each time it updates – what do you do now?

At this point go back to first principles. When you don’t know where the problem lies profile it. Sometimes, and I will admit this, you can guess where the problem is “oh yeah its because I have spriteBatch.DrawString(font,string.Format(“You have killed {0} baddies”,score, … ) in my main draw code”. But I’m becoming an old hand at this – I get surprised way more than I predict. My recommendation is nothing more than dust down the old CLRProfiler.

The current CLRProfiler is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=16273

The technique is very simple.

  1. [To find a scene to target for our investigation we do some precursor steps]
  2. Create a Xbox version of the game.
  3. Deploy to the XBox and use the remote performance manager to run the game.
  4. Find a scene that is static enough (e.g. a simple spinning of the camera around the Y axis) that you shouldn’t expect any allocations.
  5. Find, using the performance manager that there are in fact allocations and GC cycles occuring.
  6. You have now a specific and very targeted problem to solve. This is the key, bite off small chunks and solve them one at a time.
  7. Create a debug windows version of your game.
  8. Start the CLRProfiler.
  9. Set the working directory correctly.
  10. Set the “Profile Allocations” to be true.
  11. Set the “Profiling Active” to false.
  12. At this point you are ready to go.
  13. Launch the application.
  14. Now, navigate to the same point as “4” above.
  15. Click on the “Profiling active” checkbox.
  16. Collect some data for a few tens of seconds.
  17. Uncheck the “Profiling Active” checkbox.
  18. At this point use the call graph to see what objects are being allocated and where.

Horde of the Damned – Campaign Level Walkthrough Investigation

You can watch a youtube video of this walkthrough.

  • Select the village of Tref (slightly to the north of where the cursor selection begins the level)
  • Build a Windmill. This gives you a guaranteed income once it has been built.
  • Move the Scouts to the South East of the map and attack the Watch tower.
    • The Undead will get less income
    • You will get more income
    • They will expose themselves and either attack you in the watch tower or move across the map to Tref
  • Build some defenders inteh Watch tower just in case
  • If they move the North (to attack Tref) then capture Owan
  • If they attack the watch tower then defeat the attacking army and then capture Owan
  • Don’t let your commander die. If Mervyn dies then it is game over – this applies to all levels.
  • If you don’t spend your money the upkeep on the scouts will drain it if they aren’t garrisoned in a settlement

Flap Basic Controls

Use the thumb stick to control your dragon. You may fly all over the screen but you cannot fly into the ground.

Left handed players use the right thumb stick; right handed players use the left thumb stick on the controller.

Use the right handed trigger to fire. You my keep it pressed and the dragon will fire as fast as it can.

Mana

As you destroy buildings and other targets Mana will be released. The Mana may be used to cast spells. Pressing the “A” button will cast the currently selected spell.

Use the D-Pad control to move the spell selector left and right.

Quick Cast

Two spells have buttons permanently assigned to them. The Shield spell may be cast with the “B” button Flap Quick Cast Shield and the heal spell may be cast with the “X” button. Button X

The next recommended spell will be assigned to the “Y”button Y button. As soon as you cast a spell with “Y” it will move onto the next recommendation. The quick cast buttons will only apear if you can afford the spells.