Mitch Walker : Game Programming

Finish the...

mitchw — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:48:00 GMT

When we shipped XNA Game Studio 3.0 last month, and then turned on Xbox LIVE Community Games this month, that, to me, really completed our initial vision for XNA Game Studio, the changes in the way games are made, and creating opportunities for a new class of game developers. While there will always be a list of things to be added or improved to XNA Game Studio and the XNA Framework, I was having trouble finding tough, interesting problems to solve, which is what motivates me.

So I’ve taken my love of games, of creating platforms and tools, and of a particular game series and found my next big challenge to tackle. A couple of weeks ago, I started as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Halo Studio team. I’m joining a(nother) team filled with very talented people and I’m excited about the possibilities.

Unfortunately, what I’ll be working on won’t lend itself to public blogging much anymore…not that I’ve been a regular blogger anyway. And I usually don’t post (or twitter) about day to day stuff. Me getting another Diet Dew from the fridge just doesn’t seem that interesting. J I’ll keep this blog around for a bit and see how it goes.

I’ll still be involved in the XNA Game Studio community, but now from the “other” side…a creator…as I continue to learn, create, and wait to see what the team comes up with next.

-Mitch

The One About Storage

mitchw — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:31:00 GMT

So I’ve played quite a few XNAGS games, and quite a few that have been released to Xbox LIVE Marketplace as part of the Xbox LIVE Community Games beta. Based on the types of issues we’ve seen and feedback in general about good development practices, we set out to create the “best practices” for creating Community Games document. This will be a living document that is continuously updated and expanded upon as we find out what works, what doesn’t work, what is difficult, and what are some things most games should attempt to do. There is one issue, however, that I’ve seen crop up quite often and I figure it’s worth discussing in more depth what it is, what causes it, and how to prevent it.

Let’s call it the “Storage API Hang of Fun”. You’ve probably run across it. You build your game, add save game or high score support and being a good XNAGS citizen, use the Storage APIs to get a hold of a proper StorageContainer so you can read and write the files to the correct place. Everything seems to be working well; it’s time to beta test! So you package up your game and hand it out to a few people to try.

“Your game freezes my Xbox 360”

What? How can this be? It was working perfectly on my machine! I thought the purpose of a console was that it is a fixed hardware platform that is easy to develop against since everyone will have the same hardware!

Except there is one area that each console can be slightly different: Storage devices, or more specifically, the number of devices available. Ask the person who is having trouble if they have a HDD and a Memory Unit plugged in. Most likely they do. Have them remove the Memory Unit and I bet the game starts to function properly. Problem solved! But why did it happen? Let’s take a look into a couple of areas that have led you down this path.

The Guide

In XNA Game Studio 2.0 we provided access to Gamer Profiles and the Guide functionality of the Xbox 360. The Guide is a system service that is running in the background of your game. This is the UI that is displayed when the user hits the silver Xbox 360 button on their controllers, want to create a Friend request, view their messages, etc. The system “hooks” our call to GraphicsDevice.Present (which gets called for you inside of Game.EndDraw). Inside of this, it performs any input processing and drawing, which is how it can draw on top of your game without you needing to do anything.

The only thing you need to do is to make sure your game is running, i.e. having Update and Draw called into (and you allowing them to return) at least 15 times a second (the recommended minimum). As long as your game isn’t blocked on the main thread, the Guide will be able to come and go as it pleases and everyone is happy.

Unless you block the main thread. This is why we designed many of the Guide APIs to use the .NET asynchronous call pattern. If the particular Guide API you are calling requires user input and expects data to return, then you have to call the Guide API such that it occurs on a background thread…this allows your main thread to continue to run, which will eventually call GraphicsDevice.Present.

Storage APIs

Guide.BeginShowStorageDeviceSelector is one such API. The purpose of this API is to allow the user to choose what storage device they would like the game to read and write from. Since the Xbox 360 can have any combination of a HDD and up to two Memory Units, a “well behaved” game will allow the user to choose whichever device that is present.

When we released XNA Game Studio Express, we provided a non-asynchronous Guide.ShowStorageDeviceSelector API, knowing that on the Xbox 360, calling this on the main thread would instantly lock your console. We provided for those that would like to call this blocking version from a background thread. In XNAGS 2.0 we introduced many more Guide APIs and we wanted to clean things up a bit and make them more consistent. We realized that the correct way to call this API was to call it asynchronously, so we removed the blocking version and helped those unfamiliar with the pattern to move their code. The native APIs that we call by default won’t display the selection UI if there is only one storage device available. Instead it will return instantly with the “default” device. In our first release, we passed in a flag that basically says “always show the UI”. In another effort to help make this easier, we stopped passing this flag in XNAGS 2.0 so that if only one device is available, the call will return immediately. Unfortunately the combination of these two changes (requiring you to call it asynchronously and not display the UI if there is only one device), led many people to write the following code:

IAsyncResult result = Guide.BeginShowStorageDeviceSelector(...);

while(result.IsCompleted == false)

{

}

StorageDevice device = Guide.EndShowStorageDeviceSelector(result);

If you call this piece of code on the main thread…what will happen? The Begin call will succeed, we’ll then sit there and spin until the user has selected the device they want to use and the operation is “complete”. We’ll then call the End method and get the device. But if we’re spinning on IsCompleted, then that means GraphicsDevice.Present is not getting called, which means the user won’t be able to select a device, so that while condition will never complete.

The game is now deadlocked. The user will have to reboot their Xbox 360.

Unless…they only have one storage device available. In which case, IsCompleted will immediately be true, you’ll get down to the End call and everything will return normally!

So, a long description of a relatively simple problem and one that is easy to get yourself into. How do we fix it? By handling the async pattern correctly. You have two choices and they are both valid. One is to store the IAsyncResult as a member variable in your game and check IsCompleted inside of your Update call. The other is to pass in a callback method to BeginShowStorageDeviceSelector. Once the operation is completed, your method will get called, the IAsyncResult will get passed to you, and you can use it to complete the operation. I generally prefer the callback method, but again, either pattern is equally correct.

Here’s a simple example of how you can call this API so that it behaves correctly regardless of the number of storage devices the user has.

public class MyGameState

{

public StorageDevice Device;

}

public class MyGame : Game

{

protected override void LoadContent()

{

// Some object you want to have passed into the callback

MyGameState myGameState = new MyGameState();

Guide.BeginShowStorageDeviceSelector(StorageCompletedCallback, myGameState);

}

void StorageCompletedCallback(IAsyncResult result)

{

// Retrieve the state you passed in

MyGameState myGameState = (MyGameState)result.AsyncState;

// Complete the call and retrieve the selected StorageDevice

myGameState.Device = Guide.EndShowStorageDeviceSelector(result);

}

Hopefully if you’ve run into this problem with your games, you now have a better understanding of what is occurring, and how to fix it.

Audio Compression using XACT

mitchw — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 03:25:00 GMT

There are two pieces of feedback that I hear quite a bit related to the audio support in XNA Game Studio Express.

It only supports WAV files. All of my sounds are in a different format, such as WMA.
Audio binaries are too large. WAV isn't compressed, so my music tracks are huge!

We're investigating what we can do for the first issue, which would obviously help the second issue at the same time. But there is some support for compressing your audio files in the current product, using the XACT tool; it's just not easy to discover. XACT supports ADPCM compression on Windows and XMA compression on the Xbox 360. You can get about 4:1 compression with ADPCM and even better with XMA. So while perhaps not as high as some other encodings, such as WMA, it does offer quite a substantial savings.

So how do you enable compression for your Wavebanks? Let's take a look:

Create an XACT project and a Wave Bank
Start the XACT editor by using the Start menu shortcut Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express -> Tools -> Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT). Create a new project and add a new Wave Bank to the project.

Add some WAV files to the Wave Bank
While we won't be playing any sounds during this, we do want to see the results of the compression. Once your done with this, you should see something like the below screenshot.

Create a new Compression Preset
You can create a group of compression settings via a Compression Preset. This allows you to reuse the settings across multiple Wave Banks. This is also why it's a bit hidden. Rather than adjusting the compression settings on the sounds themselves or the Wave Bank, we do it here. You can create a new Compression Preset easily by right-clicking on the Compression Presets item in the explorer.

Tweak Settings
After you've created it, you can see the default compression settings for ADPCM and XMA. You do have the ability to change some of these settings, although we'll just leave the defaults for this exercise.

Apply the Compression Preset to the Wave Bank.
This is as easy as selecting the Wave Bank we created earlier, and then selecting the Compression Preset we just created in the Properties window for the Wave Bank. This tells the XACT compiler that we would like it to compress the WAV files using the preset settings when it builds the Wave Bank binaries.

Done!
If we look at the details for the WAV files that are in the Wave Bank, we see that they now indicate they are compressed and how much space is saved.

I hope this was helpful for those that didn't know about the ability to compress your audio binaries using XACT. While not as compressed as some other formats, it should provide for smaller game sizes, especially when including audio assets for background music.

XNA Happenings

mitchw — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:52:00 GMT

You've probably seen the post announcing we're releasing a Beta 2 of XNA Game Studio Express. This release contains lots of fixes and tweaks based on feedback and it includes the much anticipated Content Pipeline! As we get closer to release, I'll have a post that explains some of the changes.

If you want to get a sneak peak at what's coming in the beta, then you should stop by the Seattle Code Camp v2.0 that is happening this weekend. There are a lot of great sessions, including 3 XNA related sessions:

Making an XNA Game for the Xbox 360
Introduction to the Programmable Pipeline in XNA
Exploring the XNA Framework

I'm giving the last session where we'll be looking at new features and changes in the XNA Framework, a little peak into the Content Pipeline and our support for the Xbox 360!

Calling Casual Game Developers

mitchw — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 09:05:00 GMT

Are you a hobby, casual or Indie game developer? If so, we're looking for participants in a usability study which will help us build better products and technologies to help serve your needs in this area.

Participation criteria:

You must have been actively involved in programming games within the past year.
You must be a student, hobbyist (meaning you develop games for fun), or Indie game developer. For this particular study we are not considering professional game developers who work at established studios unless you also develop games for fun outside of work.
For this particular study we are looking for participants who reside within 30 miles of Seattle, Washington.

Users who are interested in participating in the study and meet the criteria above should complete our short (5-10 minutes) survey here:

http://www.developersurvey.com/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?s=F418DF772FE24D96A1A38F3BDCD4131A

Once we receive survey responses we will begin contacting the candidates if they meet our selection criteria.

Thanks!

Terrarium 1.2 Server Available

mitchw — Wed, 11 May 2005 02:40:00 GMT

I'm glad to announce that the Terrarium 1.2 Server is finally available for download. Head on over to the Terrarium Downloads area to snag it.

Now included is a configuration tool that will create the database, create the virtual directory and congifure permissions and settings for you. Also, the server no longer requires Office Web Components for charting!

DirectX 9.0 SDK October 2004 Update Available

mitchw — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 04:26:00 GMT

An update to the DirectX SDK is now available. Here is a brief list of changes:

        Tool Updates
                PIX             - Call capture and playback, Asynchronous events, Triggers and Actions
                Maya Exporter   - Maya 6 Support, Procedural texture support, Updated installer

        New Samples
                C++             - AntiAliasing, Instancing, ConfigSystem
                Managed         - PrtPerVertex, FragmentLinker , SimpleAnimation

        Bug fixes
                D3DX            - Debug Output Muting, PRT Blocker meshes no longer have a 65,535 vertex limit, texture UV coordinate transformation)
                DirectX for Managed Code        - memory leak in TextureLoader.FromFile, unhandled exception errors)

I am especially excited about the Maya 6 exporter. The last SDK only included support for Maya 5 and it didn't work with the new version.

Here are the links to the downloads. This is "breaking" news, so the main portal page, http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx, hasn't been updated yet.

Release Notes
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=97CDCC31-7D0C-4F4F-81B1-16A0A7C29FB9&displaylang=en

Software Developer Kit
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7BC31FA-2DF1-44FD-95A4-C2555446AED4&displaylang=en

Extras
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D6F237DE-A6EE-4DED-8BB6-139536162EB8&displaylang=en

Symbols
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=87336CEE-864D-440E-840F-25C53D5DEEE4&displaylang=en

Preliminary Managed DirectX Documentation?

mitchw — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 19:56:00 GMT

If you've downloaded the latest DirectX9 SDK, you may have noticed that all of the Managed docs are tagged with the “This documentation is preliminary and subject to change.“ line. Here's the scoop from Mark, one of the Programming Writers:

The Summer 2004 SDK Update provides complete, release-quality reference documentation for the following Managed DirectX namespaces:

Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback
Microsoft.DirectX.Diagnostics
Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D
Microsoft.DirectX.DirectSound
Microsoft.DirectX.PrivateImplementationDetails
Microsoft.DirectX

Developers can use documentation for the above namespaces in confidence, despite the “preliminary” disclaimer on the pages. The conceptual material provided in the “Introducing DirectX 9.0” section is also accurate, although the section is not considered complete.

However, documentation for the remaining namespaces does not meet Microsoft’s release quality standards:

Microsoft.DirectX.DirectDraw (deprecated)
Microsoft.DirectX.DirectInput
Microsoft.DirectX.DirectPlay (deprecated)
Microsoft.DirectX.Security

Unfortunately the documentation build system did not allow the “preliminary” disclaimer to be displayed selectively on only some pages, so the decision was made to keep the disclaimer on all the pages.

Heading to Meltdown

mitchw — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 01:19:00 GMT

I'm heading off to Meltdown. Well, not really until tomorrow morning, seeing as it is just in downtown Seattle. Should be cool, hoping to pick up some new ideas to try out. Tom's giving a talk titled Using Managed Code in Your Game, and there are quite a few sessions on Effects, Shaders and the like, so lots of good stuff for the Managed DirectX Developer.

Terrarium 1.2 Released!

mitchw — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 19:22:00 GMT

The Terrarium 1.2 client has been released to the public! Here are various links:

Public Server: http://www.terrariumgame.net/terrarium

Post with details: http://www.windowsforms.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabIndex=1&tabId=41&PostID=16874

A partial list of What's New:

Organism SDK Installed with Client (Includes docs, tutorials, reference and skeletons)
VS.NET 2003 Project Templates
Resizable Windows
Full screen support (two modes, "maximize" and "Alt-Enter")
Better screen saver support (actually takes up the full screen. Check out the <screenSaverSpanMonitors/> setting!)
New User Interface, including multiple themes
Style editor - create your own themes
Updated world graphics (Additional backgrounds will be made available for download)
Fixed the intentional exception throwing exploit
Fixed the deserialization problem
Lots of other bug fixes
A simple screen saver kicks in in the case that you are running Terrarium in the background when the screen saver gets activated.

I'm still working on finalizing the source code and the server for release. This should happen very soon.

Have fun!

Whidbey Intellisense Feature

mitchw — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 17:49:00 GMT

Just stumbled upon one of those little features that are so nice and once you get used to it, it's hard giving it up.

When attempting to assign a value to an enum property, as soon as you type “ = “, it brings up the intellisense window to the specific enum type. No hunting around or trying to remember the name of the enum. Pretty cool, especially when working with Managed DirectX, which has quite a few different flags, etc.

Long Time...

mitchw — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 18:32:00 GMT

Long time between updates! I felt I couldn't let another month go by without a post, so here I am. Yes still working on getting Terrarium 1.2 ready to release (it is real close, honest!) and working on the “next big thing”. On that last note, I leave you with this:

New Terrarium UI

mitchw — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 08:33:00 GMT

So I've spent the evening working on the UI for the 1.2 version of Terrarium. (This is the version built on .NET 1.1 and will sync with the release of the source code). At first I was going the Photoshop route for the buttons, etc. but realized that I could do much of what I was doing just using GDI+. So here is a screen shot of tonight's progress:

Obviously the UI is just laid out in “skeleton” mode right now, with none of the Terrarium functionality hooked up to it. I also need to create some icons for a few of the items. It supports a very basic “skinning” functionality as well. Via an xml file, you can provide all of the colors for the gradients, buttons, etc.

[Edit: I've updated it with a more recent shot....]

Terrarium Prototyping

mitchw — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 09:45:00 GMT

So I started working on prototyping some terrain rendering for the next Terrarium. It really is amazing how much faster one can work in Managed DirectX (Direct3D in this case) vs. the C++ API. While the screenshot below is not terribly impressive, it only took me about 2 hours to get the base framework up and running. This would have taken much longer using C++. I'll try to post some regular updates as I try various techniques for the terrain.

Mythica Canceled

mitchw — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 04:18:00 GMT

It was announced today that Mythica, a MMORPG with touches of a RTS in it, has been canceled. Here is the announcement found on the home page

“Our goal with ‘Mythica’ was to create a truly innovative massively multiplayer online role playing game. While the game looked ready to deliver advancements to the genre, after careful evaluation of the MMORPG landscape, MGS has decided to stream-line its portfolio, making fewer investments in this genre. After a rigorous review of current and future projects, the decision was made that Mythica would not be one of the projects we would continue to invest in.”

That's really a shame because it looked like it was going to be quite entertaining.

Here's a link to a video shown at last year's E3