David Kendall

Hello all! Happy belated new year. Hope your holidays were good. Sorry about the lack of posts, but I've been a bit busy what with going to london to see a comedian, Christmas and a lot of new games to play. While on my christmas break, I was also hoping to make a bit more headway with development, but alas that did not occur. You see, I was at my parents house for christmas. So I decided to grab all the code I needed off my desktop and put it on a pen stick so I could work on my laptop. However, I'm a bit stupid and instead copied the data over and then left the pen stick in the computer. Whoops!

However, before the holidays I did manage to track down what was causing the low framerates (as mentioned in my previous post). After downloading a few profiling tools I determined that none of my code should be causing significant slow down. So I searched the XNA forums for low framerate which brought up a post by Shawn Hargreaves that stated that IsFixedTimeStep should be set to false on the 360. I tried this and found out my game was in fact running at about 36 FPS (using my FrameRate counter). Which is a lot nicer than the 2 I was previously getting. Lesson Learnt. As for what is causing this framerate I do believe its my design by having lots of interface casting every frame, which means at some point in the future I may want to rethink this approach.

I've also learnt that Windows Phone will be included in the next Dream.Build.Play contest; a contest I have yet to enter. This has lead me to thinking about ideas that I may submit (if time permits), which I will share if they come into fruitation.

My objective for the weekend is to get Xbox 360 avatars implemented into the game with hopefully some animation (probably using the sample on the App Hub). I will also hopefully make some more headway on the promised code sample, which is being a bit more complicated to talk about than I thought (hard to describe my method of madness).