Saturday 18 April 2009

BreakOut clone updated

Although I am working on one or two other ideas, I figured I should not let my first (and only) completed XNA game rust away. So, I picked up ye old shovel and upgraded some code to VS2008 and XNA 3.0. The upgrade process was quite painless - apart from an issue I picked up with XACT.

In fact XACT does not seem to be working on my machine at all. Even the XACT tool fails to play any media. I googled a bit for an answer, but could not find any good reasons for this behaviour. Luck was on my side: XNA 3.0 offers an alternative to XACT for audio processing. The game is quite simple, so it was easy to remove XACT from the code, and plug in the new pieces.

I do not know what advantage XACT has for a simple game like this one. XACT took a bit of figuring out; while the new method is very straight forward. My crystal ball says most new developers will sidestep XACT while they can.

Anyways if you are interested in trying out this very basic clone, get the zip from the release on codeplex. But calm down those high expectations -- I suspect reading the code is more interesting than playing the game :).

No comments:

Post a Comment