It’s 12:24am on April 11th, 2011. Whirlygig has just been ported to the Xbox360 and run [mostly] successfully. The video is long but sorta funny if you’re into watching things glitch out and do weird stuff. There are some camera and performance issues on the xbox but, for the most part, porting was REALLY smooth. Here are issues I encountered:

  1. Porting in FlatRedBall is insanely easy. Create a synced project and you’re pretty much done. I had a few build errors because MS moved the Color class to the base Microsoft.Xna.Framework.
  2. I was using the old version of XACT and never even compiled for xbox. I had to update my XACT project (open in new version, resave…easy) and build for 360.
  3. FlatRedBall does not Glue-integration for XACT audio. Therefore, when the synced project is created it didn’t copy my audio assets into the new project. I still have a few things to fix related to this.
  4. I had Null Reference Exceptions thrown to do with the camera. These stumped me for awhile and I had to create a new Xbox project in Glue and compare the Initialization process of FRB to find the problem. Apparently you have to tell the renderer to NOT use render targets. Then it worked fine
  5. I had to make sure the DEBUG constant was not defined. My first build had framerates of about 2FPS because of some debug code somewhere.
  6. My camera flips out when a player dies. Not sure what’s wrong there.
  7. I need to implement pooling. Minigun bullets are created at a rate of 13 per second currently. This chokes the Xbox to death!

So, I have some things to fix but…as far as porting goes…this was pretty painless! Please excuse the horrible quality of this vid. It’s also kinda slow but so is my brain at this time of the night. Standby for somewhat-funny bugs.

PS: Yes, I like to drink water from a jar.