Finally in playtest on Xbox Indie Games, Avatar Kart now has: 8 CPU racers Avatars sit down and actually steer their cars Race restarting Cool loading animation Drift handling improvements Done some optimisation to get the framerate to a steady 60FPS, definitely still much more I could do. The floating point performance on the 360’s .NET Compact Framework is pretty dire..

I’ve just pieced together a renderer for QR codes that outputs a texture instead of System.Drawing.Image objects (the Xbox .Net Framework version does not have access to the Drawing namespace). I’ll be using this as a way of uploading times on Avatar Kart to my server instead of copying a code which you had to do in Lines, my previous game. I will release the code once I’ve tidied it up a bit.

My Avatar Kart game now has: A skybox An original track a floor for the world Debug and chase cameras A starting countdown I also finally got Avatars in the code (Xbox 360 only so no videos yet). Microsoft has not decided to release the bones for the avatars, so I cannot do custom animations or poses yet. Therefore they are standing in the karts at the moment…

During my down time I’ve been cracking on with XNA and am developing “Avatar Kart” – essentially Super Mario Kart on the SNES with Xbox avatars (we have to wait until XNA Game Studio 3.1 this summer for avatar support). In a couple of days I’ve managed to finish: CPU Car AI Physics and wall collisions Terrain effects Lap counts and car rankings Split screen The track is still from SMK and the cars are empty but it does the job.

My dissertation project saw me making an XNA game (Lines) and website to go with it (edngames.com) which used web services to make essentially a cut down Xbox Live on the PC with rich presence support, automatic high score uploading etc. I feel it was very successful (and the markers agreed) but I didn’t get the time to spend on the game portion that I wanted to, instead concentrating mainly on the distribution scenarios and the user experience.

After a lot of trial and error using Process Monitor and Virtual PC, I have finally sussed out exactly what XNA2.0 games on Windows need to run. The requirements are slightly different to XNA 1 games. Direct X runtimes There are four files that need to be installed in the system32 folder for XNA to initialise properly. They are: xinput1_3.dll x3daudio1_3.dll d3dx9_31.dll, and xactengine2_9.dll The first three can be placed alongside the application exe and then load fine, but xactengine2_9.