If I were Mad Magazine it would be Project Ecch

[prog]

• Traded emails with my contact at MS about Project X's status, since it's been four weeks already (sheesh) since I signed the NDA. Was told that, why yes, they would like to see a new prototype submitted with the proposal, and they appreciated my effort to make that happen. So, that's probably the last they'll be hearing from me until it's ready to go.

• Allowed mr_choronzon to help me shop for a PC. Its many parts are sitting in my newegg.com shopping cart, awaiting further orders. It's not cheap; on his advice, we aimed at building a decent gaming rig on-par with the XBox's specs. I'm keeping my jets cool about it, coz buying it would wipe out the remainder of my Project X Stage One budget. May be able to revisit it and shave a hundro or two off the cost.

One ASAP must-buy, though, is a wired 360 controller. XNA studio makes it easy to simultaneously build and run Windows and 360 versions of a game, and quick incremental testing would certainly be a lot easier if I could just plug a controller into my computer and run the thing there. I've been doing incremental testing on my 360 itself, and its navigation UI is just too clunky. (Being a game console, it's optimized to act like a bookshelf, not a desktop.)

• Finished all the XNA tutorials. The final one has you taking your Asteroids game and adding multiplayer and network functionality to it. I'm really surprised at how much of the XBox Live API is exposed to XNA - more or less all of it, from the looks of things. It's very invigorating, and I've begun to plan how the game will actually work.

Comments

[lediva.livejournal.com]

quick incremental testing would certainly be a lot easier if I could just
plug a controller into my computer and run the thing there.

Get the Windows wireless receiver so you can use wireless controllers on a Windows box?

[prog.livejournal.com]

I did not know about this. Thanks!

Now to find out how well it works on a Mac running VMWare...

[prog.livejournal.com]

Wait, I totally don't care since I can't deploy games through VMWare anyway. All righty then!

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Do you really need a PC as powerful as the 360? You're not making Gears of War here.. and a board game adaptation doesn't need to run at 60fps at HD resolutions with full MPAA while you're *testing* it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm starting to back offa this setup a bit. In fact something just came up that may let me get away with getting access to good testing rig for significantly less dough. We'll see!