Week 6: Paricles & hardware testing

This weeks tasks were to :

• Revise the existing particle system that was in place
• Add some more effect types
• Test the game on an Xbox 360

The problem with the existing particle system was that it was using a lot of memory and causing the game to slow down. So while it did work, it didn't work well! I went back and scrapped the particle system manager that I had written and took a different approach. This time around I used lists and queues with simplified things and added in checks for when things should be created or deleted. The problem I had before was that some particle systems were being created constantly and there was too much back and forth between several arrays that was creating a lot of calls to the garbage collector (which was slowing down the game).

However, once I had solved the problem I realised something. I planned to add in effects without really thinking it through. I would first need to have an asset list of all game art(next weeks task) along with an idea of what my characters were going to look like. For this reason I've postponed creating extra effects until I know what I want. This will take place during the Christmas break, during which most of the art will be created.

Moving onto hardware testing. I was able to get a free 12 month trial account with Xbox live thanks to the university MSDN scheme so that was no problem. When I tested the game on the console it gave me mixed results.

While the performance was good and there were no major bugs compared to my tests on pc, the tv screen does cut off quite a bit of the image. I had looked into drawing all my games graphics during the summer (the 'tile safe area'). Although I actually had the code set in place, I forgot to implement it! This will be something that I will have to amend before the play testing session.

The other thing was that the characters were very small, and generally, the whole scale of the level seemed to big in comparison to the characters. This is something that's been at the back of my mind for a while, but technically speaking, this would be a nightmare to change at this stage. I might find a compromise with creating bigger characters, but this change may not happen due to time constraints.

On a final note, I may have the possibility to out-source the artwork for this project to a very good 2D artist so I'm investiagting that possibility and would make changes to the time spent on artwork in the schedule should that happen. At this stage it's a possibility, I know out-sourcing is permitted for individual projects but I just want to make sure that my tutors sign off on it before going ahead with anything.