I decided about a month ago to start working on the Xbox 360 version of Spring Up in April. I think it can be interesting to share my experience about that.
Part 1 : XNA Creator Membership
Basically, you just need to pay creator membership (99 € for one year in Europe), launch XNA Game Studio Connect on your console and that’s it.
Problem 1 : You have problems to redeem your XNA account to a new X360 profile?
Solution 1 : Do not mix up your forum name and GamerTag. Yes, this one was easy but it took me at least 30 minutes to find out what was happening. 🙂
Problem 2 : XNA Game Studio Connect does not recognize your account as premium when you launch it even though you paid for membership?
Solution 2 : You have to wait for some time (a few hours, maybe half a day) and everything will be fine. Quite frustrating, I know.
Part 2 : Compiling your game for Xbox 360
Microsoft made something simple : just right click on your project in Visual C# and choose “Create copy of Project for Xbox 360”. I took my main project and all the dependencies were converted too.
Problem 3 : You have very strange compiling errors? When converting Box2D.XNA, I had weird errors such as “Class C does not implement inherited abstract member M” AND “no suitable method found to override M”.
Solution 3 : Make sure you use the proper version of assemblies. I don’t know why but the converter put assemblies of XNA 3.0 instead of 3.1. Using 3.1 assemblies fixed my problem.
Problem 4 : The code does not compile but it works fine on Windows?
Solution 4 : Make sure you do not use windows specific code. You will be able to see warning icons if you have invalid assemblies in your Xbox 360 projects. If you want to keep windows specific code, just use #if WINDOWS / #endif so that it compiles properly on Xbox 360. In my case, my level and dialog box editors are only available on windows because it needs to create XML files.
Problem 5 : You can’t build your XNB data from XML using your own classes?
Solution 5 : Make sure the Content projects still have references to windows builds. Resources are built on the development computer, using the windows assemblies.
Part 3 : Running the Game on Xbox 360
Problem 6 : Code 3 Error?
Solution 6 : When you have Code X errors, it is because the console hangs without being able to break or throw an exception to the debugger. To track this problem, I simply traced the code I suspected. As the problem happened on a specific action, I could easily see where was the problem. My problem was just a null pointer access that happens only when there is no savegame. I always have a savegame on PC, so I did not see the problem before. The strange fact is that when I traced the code the second time, I properly had the NullPointerException.
Problem 7 : Your game is slow?
Solution 7 : I knew Xbox 360’s are usually slower than PCx with XNA but I was still very surprised my I ran my game for the first time. I immediatly launched a release build to try to reassure myselft but it’s still quite slow. I am not sure what is the problem for now so I will improve my profiling code to see which GameComponent is the problem.
Conclusion
That’s it for my first run on X360. I hoped this helped some of you!