> Wow. Not even a single remark? Poop.

Yes, you need a windows version, I guess most of us in here don't have 
an xbox.  But it's cool you finished a game and people are buying it - I 
wish I could ever find the motivation and time to get to that stage!

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Nekar Xenos <nek### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)

  I think the xbox360 limits quite a lot what files you can transfer to
and from it, so it could prove difficult to transfer any .pov files to
it so that it could render them.

  You could write a text editor for the povray port (the xbox360 supports
USB keyboards), but that would be quite a bit of work. (And it would also
mean that you can only render what you write directly.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Am 07.01.2011 08:30, schrieb Nekar Xenos:

> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)

I bet.

Essentially all you'd need is a C++ compiler for that thing, then you're 
in business. Would need a new front-end of course - I don't think the 
X-Box knows what a command line is; or does it, Darren?

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Nekar Xenos wrote:
> Are you going to make a windows version as well so we can try it  out?

Well, technically, it's already a Windows version as well. You just need to 
install the compiler to get enough of the runtime. My next task is upgrading 
the compiler to the latest version (since people are starting to release 
games with the new compiler and the old compiler won't deal with the forward 
compatibility), after which I might very well take the time to #ifdef in 
Windows support.

> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)

With lots and lots of work.  The amateur xbox games have to be written in 
C#, not C++. And there isn't a whole lot of memory on the xbox (512M if I 
remember?)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Warp wrote:
> Nekar Xenos <nek### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)
> 
>   I think the xbox360 limits quite a lot what files you can transfer to
> and from it, so it could prove difficult to transfer any .pov files to
> it so that it could render them.

Again, speaking only of the amateur xbox stuff (aka XNA), there is sadly no 
good way to get any files on or off. The program can only network to other 
instances of the same program running at the same time, and it can only read 
files it created itself. (Part of the security MS imposed to let you put 
software on their machine that they haven't vetted.)

>   You could write a text editor for the povray port (the xbox360 supports
> USB keyboards), 

I'm not even sure XNA will read the keyboard. It would read the chatpad, but 
that's like coding pov-ray files on your cell phone's keyboard.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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clipka wrote:
> Am 07.01.2011 08:30, schrieb Nekar Xenos:
> 
>> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)
> 
> I bet.
> 
> Essentially all you'd need is a C++ compiler for that thing, then you're 
> in business. Would need a new front-end of course - I don't think the 
> X-Box knows what a command line is; or does it, Darren?

Honestly, all I've touched is the XNA, which is only C# (because it's 
safety-enforced and controlled), not C++. The commercial companies are using 
C++ for games like Batman or Half-Life, of course, but I think to do that 
you need like a special XBox that doesn't enforce the security, along with 
I'm sure complex contracts with Microsoft to get one and such. (That's how 
the other platforms work, at least.)

Given that, I don't know if it has a CLI or not. On the other hand, I'm not 
sure why you'd need a CLI anyway.  And given that, a GUI with a text-entry 
box is a CLI. :-)

But I don't know if the XBox is running something like a Windows shell or 
CLI inside, or whether the shell is canibalized enough that you only get the 
dashboard even while you're developing.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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scott wrote:
>> Wow. Not even a single remark? Poop.
> 
> Yes, you need a windows version, I guess most of us in here don't have 
> an xbox.  But it's cool you finished a game and people are buying it - I 
> wish I could ever find the motivation and time to get to that stage!

OK, how many people have an xbox controller for their PC? That's really more 
of a problem than making it run under Windows without the compiler 
installed. That's a whole another remapping of stuff.

(Of course, in this game, I'm not really using analog joysticks or anything, 
so polling the keyboard could be trivially mapped to the buttons on the 
controller. But that won't be the case with following games.)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> OK, how many people have an xbox controller for their PC? That's really more 
> of a problem than making it run under Windows without the compiler 
> installed. That's a whole another remapping of stuff.

  Regular PC gamepads (eg. the ones made by Logitech) *almost* work for
games which expect an Xbox 360 controller, but not quite (the button
mapping is different, of course, but more importantly one of the axes
of one of the thumbsticks is inverted).

  There exists a dll out there which you simply put in the same directory
as the main game executable, and it will emulate an Xbox 360 controller
with your regular PC gamepad and it works quite well (PC gamepads usually
don't have analog trigger buttons, though, so if any game depends on them
it will be a problem).

  Of course if you don't have even a PC gamepad, then playing a game
expecting one could prove difficult. (You could probably find some
program out there that emulates a gamepad using the keyboard, but you
won't get analog thumbstics nor triggers.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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> Well, technically, it's already a Windows version as well. You just need
> to install the compiler to get enough of the runtime.

When you use the "Publish" option from VS, doesn't it make an installer 
with the correct code to download and install necessary runtimes?  Of 
course that doesn't fix the button remapping issue for people without 
xbox controllers.

I wrote a simple "InputManager" class to allow games to map multiple 
physical controls from multiple devices to a single action in-game.  The 
digital bit works fine, but I never got around to finishing off the 
analogue part.  My idea was to be able to mark a particular logical 
control as "analogue", then if you mapped a digital physical control to 
it, it would work in an analogue way (with adjustable sensitivity etc). 
  I needed that for the steering of vehicles in my game.

>> Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to port Pov-Ray to X-Box ;)
>
> With lots and lots of work. The amateur xbox games have to be written in
> C#, not C++. And there isn't a whole lot of memory on the xbox (512M if
> I remember?)

Yeh, I wonder what spec PC would match the performance of the xbox at 
POV?  The xbox architecture is optimised for 3D games (that 512M is 
shared between the GPU and CPU IIRC, so no delay transferring data 
between the two like in a PC).  IMO the PS3 would be better for POV, you 
used to be able to install Linux on it (and Intel had a C++ compiler 
that used all the cores in the CPU), so it seems more feasible than on 
the xbox.  There are some demo videos floating around of real-time 
raytracing on the PS3.

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scott wrote:
>> Well, technically, it's already a Windows version as well. You just need
>> to install the compiler to get enough of the runtime.
> 
> When you use the "Publish" option from VS, doesn't it make an installer 
> with the correct code to download and install necessary runtimes? 

It is supposed to, yes. I understand there were some bugs in the 3.1 
installer in that respect, and I've never really banged on it hard enough to 
make one of those work.

> I wrote a simple "InputManager" class to allow games to map multiple 
> physical controls from multiple devices to a single action in-game.  The 
> digital bit works fine, but I never got around to finishing off the 
> analogue part.  My idea was to be able to mark a particular logical 
> control as "analogue", then if you mapped a digital physical control to 
> it, it would work in an analogue way (with adjustable sensitivity etc). 
>  I needed that for the steering of vehicles in my game.

Yeah, I just haven't needed to do that on my game, since I hadn't really 
planned to release a PC version anyway.  All the code to support such a 
thing is there.

> IMO the PS3 would be better for POV, 

Almost undoubtably. I just saw an announcement of FreeBSD released for the 
creacked-PS3.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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