First off im an artist not a programmer, but Im feeling the frasturation that my programmer mate is suffering. Even if i don't understand the exact problem....
We are in the middle of developing our second Indie game for the 360 and PC, development has been good, much tidier than our previous project since that was our first time out with many many lessons learnt.
With the recent release of XNA framework 4.0 and MS cutting support for XNA3.5 we felt this weekend would be a good time to upgrade, as we are at taht point where we have all the basics in and just need to flood the game with assets and behaviors, the upgrade, we thought would take maybe half a day as we knew there world be changes in the framework taht our game would need to adear to...but its now taken 15hours and counting.... this is becuase of a near-showstopper framework bug...which fundamentally MS SHOULD have ironed out before releasing the upgrade...even more so as an indie game released with a similar bug would not make it onto XB:IG or XB:AC.
Though as I said my understanding is limited, the bug is with custom editors people build to help with there game (level builders particle editors etc)...our game has 5 editors which we are using to build it. The information saved form these editors is saved in XML files. BUT there is a crash on load on the Xbox relating to these 'custom' XML files....(Bearing in mind XML is the only scripting language used on the Xbox id have expected MS to at least have tested there implimentation thourghly.)
It took my mate afew hours to strip everything out the game and load things in 1 by 1 to figure out exacly what was causing the crash...having done research it seems we are definatily not the only ones affected by this and so far noone seems to have a definitive solution.
Though there is work arounds they don't even bear thinking about, one of which is hardcoded .cs files which then defeats the point of the editors in the first place or 10,000 line text file to game object conversion...which would be a complete nightmare.
Just wondering how anyone here is finding the upgrade to 4.0 and if you have got/had similar problems?
John
So XNA framework 4.0....how many people is the XML bug affecting then?
What do you mean by "XML is the only scripting language"? XML ir scripting language? Can't you simply use simple txt files or any other plain/text format for your needs?
Author
Sadly not.
I already asked my mate this and he said that XML is the only supported object desrializer in XNA....
Theres a bug in the new version of XNA that won't load XML files created/edited in custom editors (like level builds,particle editors, AI editors etc) which themselves are built in the XNA framework on the Xbox.
John
I already asked my mate this and he said that XML is the only supported object desrializer in XNA....
Theres a bug in the new version of XNA that won't load XML files created/edited in custom editors (like level builds,particle editors, AI editors etc) which themselves are built in the XNA framework on the Xbox.
John
I googled a bit and can't find anything about an XML deserialization bug specific to XNA 4 which wasn't just programmer error.
The most common source of problems seems to be caused by:
- Creating the XML file using some custom tool which isn't writing the data with the correct serializer.
- Expecting the IntermediateFormatter to figure our the format, even though it can't read what the custom tool wrote.
OR
- Attempting to read the raw XML file at runtime rather than an XNB created from that XML file.
Make sure your editor tools are using the same XML serializer that the XNA 4 content pipeline is using. I suspect you might either be using a) an older version, or b) the .Net heavyweight XML formatter which may not be compatible with XNA's formatter.
The most common source of problems seems to be caused by:
- Creating the XML file using some custom tool which isn't writing the data with the correct serializer.
- Expecting the IntermediateFormatter to figure our the format, even though it can't read what the custom tool wrote.
OR
- Attempting to read the raw XML file at runtime rather than an XNB created from that XML file.
Make sure your editor tools are using the same XML serializer that the XNA 4 content pipeline is using. I suspect you might either be using a) an older version, or b) the .Net heavyweight XML formatter which may not be compatible with XNA's formatter.
Author
Cheers, Nypyren
Ill check with him tomorrow and see if he has already tried those things...
Regards,
John
Ill check with him tomorrow and see if he has already tried those things...
Regards,
John
XNA has nothing to do with XML.
Make sure the C# XML functionality you are using is supported on the Xbox360's .Net COMPACT FRAMEWORK.
Make sure you are using whatever XML reader you are using correctly. Check for errors and handle them. Don't just assume all the loading code works fine.
Make sure the C# XML functionality you are using is supported on the Xbox360's .Net COMPACT FRAMEWORK.
Make sure you are using whatever XML reader you are using correctly. Check for errors and handle them. Don't just assume all the loading code works fine.
Quote:Original post by Bronco78th
... MS cutting support for XNA3.5...
First off, there is no XNA 3.5, it's 3.1. :)
Second, where did you hear that they're cutting off support for 3.1? The beta for the Connect software on the 360 supports both 3.1 and 4.0 projects.
Quote:Original post by Machaira
Second, where did you hear that they're cutting off support for 3.1? The beta for the Connect software on the 360 supports both 3.1 and 4.0 projects.
On that tangent, are there any public details available on how long support for 3.1 will last? I've got some 3.1 hobby things lying around I tinker on every now and then, so it'd be nice to know if I will still be able to stick these on my 360 for the foreseeable future.
Quote:Original post by remigius
On that tangent, are there any public details available on how long support for 3.1 will last?
Nothing has been publicly announced. If you have the choice move to 4.0 however.
Quote:Original post by Machaira
Nothing has been publicly announced. If you have the choice move to 4.0 however.
Thanks for the info. I probably have the choice, but there's no real gain in it for me I think since I still do my tinkerings on the PC. I learned the hard way that it's typically a better idea to pick a platform and stick with it for a given project, than to go migrating existing codebases to new iterations of a platform when those new iterations don't have any compelling new features to offer for the project at hand. With that in mind my general feel is that the XNA iterations are going a bit too fast, for whatever that's worth.
I'm badly out of the loop and probably no part of the target audience for the latest few iterations of XNA, but I can't help but wonder if this concern hasn't been voiced before. The XNA release cycle seems to be close to catching up on (or even overtaking) the development cycle of the games, which doesn't strike me as a sound situation. It hampers adaptation of the platform by newcomers who have to try and make sense of all the versions and the associated incompatible resources and it obviously hampers ongoing development efforts which get burdened by a migration without real benefits, just to be on the safe side. Again to be sure, I'm out of the loop and am by no means a representative XNA user, but threads like these do seem to support this view.
I realize this is not my most useful, positive or even on-topic post, but it kinda wrote itself [smile]
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