Lapse

Hello, faithful few.

While I realize I was never terribly prolific here to begin with, I thought I'd pop in nevertheless and note that I'm especially unprolific (it's a word because I SAY SO!) lately because I'm in the process of buying a house.  I close in just over a week, and then it'll be moving and buying furniture and whatnot, so development on Let's Get Tanked will continue to stagnate for the time being.

Over and out!

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Vidyuh!

Behold my tanky awesomeness.

Sorry for the terrible quality imposed by Blogger video, but you get the idea.  It's really cool on a 42-inch HD TV!

Holiday!

Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers*!

I'm hoping to get some good work done over the holiday weekend.  I'll be spending a lot of time at my parents', availing myself of their easy chair.  I find a good recliner is the most comfortable place for laptop-based development.

* - I know you're out there.  I can hear you breathing!

On Videos, and Them Not Existing

So I got some friends to play Let's Get Tanked! in its current state so I could capture a video.  Except I pressed the wrong button, and no video was captured.  Sadly I didn't realize it until much later.  There WILL BE VIDEO!  Just not as soon as I'd hoped.

Pow! Biff! Bop! Whammo!

That's right, folks.  Sound effects.  I haz them.

Actually, Let's Get Tanked (I now reveal the name of my current project!) has them, and collision detection between bullets and tanks.  Video coming as soon as I can hornswaggle three friends to play local multiplayer with me long enough to capture a quick film.

It's really starting to come together.  I am becoming cautiously optimistic.

Okay, okay, I'm golly-well excited!  It's starting to feel like a real game now that four people can drive their tanks around and shoot at each other, and hear a big "kaboom" when they get a hit.  Woo!

Well That's Dumb

I resolved my rendering issue thanks to this XNA forum post which indicates that Viewports (which determine which portion of the screen actually gets drawn on) initialize with maximum and minimum depth set to zero.  This explains why the problem on xbox only showed up when I was using split-screen, as it involves creating new viewports.  So basically all the depth calculations were getting clamped between 0 and 0, effectively rendering the depth buffer useless.  A quick change to explicitly set appropriate minimum and maximum depths (0 and 1) fixed the problem completely.

What I don't understand now is why the problem DIDN'T show up on Windows, but I really don't care at this point.  There are other weird problems happening on Windows that don't happen on xbox (for some reason, my game sounds don't work on Windows, but they work on Xbox), and I can't be bothered to track down the cause.  Probably I need to do a fresh reinstallation on my laptop, but again, can't be bothered.

Anyway, the important thing is it's working correctly now!  I can carry on with fruitful development instead of banging my head against bugs.