Day 104: No Longer Blocked By Blockage

Phew! The Xbox cross-platform project is finally through. After managing all the collision boxes (to follow the rules of DirectX's flipped y coordinates) and properly setting the fade value (0xFFFFFFFF was how colors are stored, with the most significant bits holding the alpha. Therefore, I couldn't just overflow the values by adding past 0xFF. Bit shifting helped fix that up rather nicely!

As for the extremely hard part, that involved working XACT audio in the sound. The playing sound part was straightforward once the sound bank was set up, but actually setting up the audio is the hard part. When setting up a project in XACT, one starts with a wave bank, which holds wave files. Wave files can be stored (one or more) as sounds in a sound bank, which also have cues to play those sounds. That all together, I also didn't know a very important aspect to our testing; the music media was loaded in the hard drive memory of the XDK, so the bank had to be setup as streaming from the hard drive instead of in-memory. After that? Well, things fell into place from there.

Now back to capstone, I was also surprised to see how much I had finished up once I tackled the LeyBlocker. That object had some odd logic attached to it, or that the actors I was assigning the laser block point to kept switching places with the next pedestal as a target point, causing a nasty flicker (which I assumed was bad line tracing). Now with that and adding in some art for the insect AI, things are slowly coming together: