Code center > Darwinbots3

SVN Source

<< < (2/2)

Numsgil:

--- Quote from: Cyberduke ---I think we will have to create two lightweight GUI  ‘clients’ one for windows and one for the X-box due to the differing requirements of the UI and features we could actually use, including differing approaches to networking, aka X-box Live (unless you’re a large company and can get on MS’s good side), everything behind these lightweight UI’s  would remain the same. For now we would just work on the Windows client and forget about the X-box, when we have something up and running, we can think about how an X-box version would work. Just keep everything in managed code.
--- End quote ---

XBox live is the only way to network once your on the xbox, right?  Last I heard XBox live had all kinds of limitations with XNA while they sorted out what sort of quality control they wanted to have.


--- Quote ---I am still debating whether or not to create a custom XNA GUI or use ‘winforms’ with a handle for XNA, unfortunately doing so actually requires scraping a part of the XNA code base (the ’Game’ class) and requires you to write your own Graphics Device implementation.
Of course if you ever wanted to get this running on an X-box in any shape or form you have no choice but to write your own basic GUI anyway (There are number of GUI libraries out there though).
--- End quote ---

I think there's a more fundamental issue needing answering first.  The core of Darwinbots is running bots, which are essentially plain text files that need to be loaded at sim start.  How are we going to get the bots on to the XBOX at all?  Do they network with the user's home computer?  And then when you'll want to eventually transfer bots or whole sims back to your home computer, and how do you do that?  It might be that there's no GUI at all, that you just set everything up through Visual Studio and export a settings file as part of the upload-to-the-xbox process.


--- Quote ---And on the subject of GUI’s I thought It would be cool to have separate mini environments with their own settings accessible from the main UI you could use as ‘holding cells’ So when you feel like playing god in a evo sim you can drag and drop some bots in to a ‘refugium’ to feed them up or get them to mate, or a ‘ring’ to have one-on-one fights.  
--- End quote ---

Yep, that idea's been floating around for a while.  It's something I want to get to for DB3.

Cyberduke:

--- Quote from: Numsgil ---XBox live is the only way to network once your on the xbox, right? Last I heard XBox live had all kinds of limitations with XNA while they sorted out what sort of quality control they wanted to have.
--- End quote ---
Yes, and I have never tried doing any networking (or any other development for that matter) for the X-box, but something we do have in our favour is the complexity of the networking on this project is very simple compared to say a FPS with networked physics (which it seems is what everyone else is trying to use it for).


--- Quote from: Numsgil ---I think there's a more fundamental issue needing answering first. The core of Darwinbots is running bots, which are essentially plain text files that need to be loaded at sim start. How are we going to get the bots on to the XBOX at all? Do they network with the user's home computer? And then when you'll want to eventually transfer bots or whole sims back to your home computer, and how do you do that? It might be that there's no GUI at all, that you just set everything up through Visual Studio and export a settings file as part of the upload-to-the-xbox process.
--- End quote ---
Well, to be honest I don't yet know, I will try to find out some more, this was one of the reasons I was opting to put the x-box implementation aside for now but, keep everything vaguely compatible for when we come to look at it later on once we have something to play with. But I was imagining treating a bot not as a text file that you can do anything with (on the Xbox) but rather a binary piece of data like say a saved game or extra content, these could then be imported into the DB simulation (by CD or Xbox Live), where you could pick and choose what to include, set up the simulation from the available options and run it, then evolve and or interfere with the bots at a basic level, inserting or deleting individuals, even better if you had the holding cell idea in place.  There is perhaps even room for a very dumbed-down clumsy graphical bot editor (Take a zero bot and add units of prebuilt functionality from a selection) this in theory could all be networked over Xbox and Windows Live to link both X-box and Windows simulations in a similar way to what’s already been discussed for the pure windows client.  It should really be considered very much a gimmick though at the moment.

Shadow run is an example of a game that spans platforms from the X-box to Windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun_(2007_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_for_Windows_-_LIVE


Of course the other main option still open to us at this stage is if you don’t like the sound of all that; we can go back to an OpenGL implementation and span Windows and Linux (with mono).

Numsgil:
Yeah, other than making sure it actually compiles with under XBox (XBox uses a dumbed down version of .NET-- er, sorry, a "lite" version ), I'm not going to worry too much about XBox at this point.

Numsgil:
Oh, and send me a PM and I'll give you write access to the repository when you're ready.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page