XNA on Windows Mobile 7

Windows Mobile has never had a good reputation. Microsoft are looking to change that with Windows Mobile 7, which looks very ZuneHD in nature.

The good news is that Windows Mobile 7 will support XNA natively, meaning for the first time XAGE should be directly supported on a smartphone. This is a very different to the proposed iPhone support, which remains purely hypothetical at this stage.

XAGE Awakener has been in the wild for a week and has been received pretty well. I've learnt a few things that will come in useful for future commercial releases. General consensus is that lack of RMB support is a pain, though this should be rectified once Silverlight v4 comes out of beta.

It is a relief to have something tangible to show after nearly two years of development. I feel like Silverlight has been proven to be a viable release platform for adventure games. The next two major milestones are to do the same for the Xbox360 and also release a stable version of XAGE Editor.

I've had a handful of approaches from individuals about working on some other projects, so it will be interested to see if any of those pan out. In the meantime, there's still plenty to be getting on with. Amongst those is, yes, revisiting Awakener. As alluded to in the conversion video, the on_mouse_click function isn't yet handled and all user input is still hardcoded in XAGE. Once this is sorted it should add a new level of usability to other converted AGS games. Other short terms goals include:

• Cleaning up XAGE Editor.
• Completing GUI editing.
• Adding support for OpenQuest's GUIs.
• Updating The Fourth Wall to the latest version (replacing deprecated actions).

XAGE Awakener - Live

Five months of my spare time condensed into a single blog entry: The XAGE version of Awakener is finished. Huzzah.

You can play it one of two ways (although they're essentially the same thing):

1. Directly in a browser - http://www.clarvalon.com/XAGE/games/Awakener/
2. Via Facebook - http://apps.facebook.com/awakener/

To the best of my knowledge, this represents several firsts:

• First AGS game to be ported to XAGE (and therefore be playable online & on xbox 360).
• First public XAGE game release.
• First Xna-based game to become a facebook app(?).

As always, the XAGE project is hungry for feedback. Massive thanks to Ben Chandler and Bill Reiss, without whom the above would not have been possible. Ta also to all the last-minute beta testers.

Two Requests

1. Anyone who can spare twenty minutes and would like to beta-test a super-secret* silverlight game, please email me at clarvalon@live.co.uk and I'll pass on the link. It would really help me out to get a fresh set of eyes on it, and to get a feel for performance on a range of machines.
2. Bit of a long shot, this: There was an anonymous poster a few months back who was in the process of writing their own pathfinding algorithm, using boxes similar to XAGE. If you could get in touch, It'd be great to pick your brains over how you implemented the line-of-site functionality I remember seeing in your youtube videos. XAGE's pathfinding is only about 75% of where I'd like it to be.

* Well, not that secret if you've been paying any sort of attention in the last six months.

XAGE Games as Facebook Apps

Regardless of what you may think about Zynga, the numbers reported to be playing FarmVille are astonishing. This is due, in no small part, to the viral manner in which the game is distributed via Facebook.

I spent the morning having a quick look at the Facebook API when it suddenly dawned on me - Silverlight Applications (and therefore games) are supported. A few hours later I'd been able to set up a quick test App using the latest Awakener build:

Note: The App itself has not been submitted to the Facebook Application Directory and it is linking to the game via a local host, but it's pleasing how simple this proof-of-concept has been.

There's a lot of potential with this. It could be used as a means of distributing a demo and raising awareness for a commercial game, or it could be used to give freeware games a larger audience (with, perhaps, a paypal donate button attached to the app). Or there could be integration with Facebook Credits e.g. reach a certain level and you need to cough up to keep playing, similar to the Xbox Indie Trial system.

Chances are I'll need a new 'Publish to Facebook' option in XAGE Editor.

Compression & Encryption

Over the last few days I've cleared a couple of crucial items from the roadmap that I've been putting off for months.

For reasons that escape me now, XAGE Editor was using a different zipping library than the engine itself. Now everything uses the excellent SharpZipLib library, which has provided some decent space savings when it comes to publishing XAGE games to different platforms. This is how all versions compare in their distributable packages, in order of size:

1. XAGE Awakener - Silverlight (.xap): 5.28mb
2. AGS Awakener - Native Windows (.zip): 5.71mb
3. XAGE Awakener - Xbox 360 (.ccgame): 6.44mb
4. XAGE Awakener - Native Windows (.zip): 7.67mb

So as it currently stands, the Silverlight version is the smallest, and comes in at a paltry 1.8mb with the music removed. Whether these relative sizes will scale this way for larger games remains to be seen, but considering XBLIG's can be up to 200mb in size, the compression is more than satisfactory.

In addition, save game files are now also compressed, with a typical save for Awakener coming in at about 60k. Loading and saving isn't as snappy as I'd like it to be (particularly on Silverlight) as there's a lot going on in the background but it's never more than a few seconds.

In the past I've touched upon encryption. It's important to ensure all of a game's raw assets are protected from both casual inspection and more determined snooping. As the heavy-duty AES encryption wasn't supported on the Xbox & Silverlight, I've had to look elsewhere. I've now implemented a system I'm reasonably happy with, as everything is now locked away from prying eyes. This also includes save files, to prevent tampering.

Finally, Awakener now has only 49 script errors remaining. I said I'd be happy if I got it under 100. Consider me ecstatic if I get it down to under 10.

AeroNuts

The ninth conversion project. Abstauber from the AGS forums kindly offered to send me the source to his MAGS winner, AeroNuts. It's part SCUMM-esque point 'n click, part arcade shoot-em-up (such is the versatility of the AGS engine):

As expected, the shmup parts don't run at all. The adventuring sections are up and running, though they are not especially functional as AeroNuts, much like the HitchHikers remake, relies quite heavily on custom modules. I had to implement a small, temporary hack in order to get the character.GSay() statements to convert into XAGE Talk Actions.

It's been a useful exercise in that it has helped identify and fix a handful of bugs with both the AGS Plugin and XAGE Editor. As with all conversions, I'll be revisiting them periodically as XAGE matures. Most of them will become more playable when certain input-related functions are handled correctly. You can find the original version of AeroNuts here. Well worth a look.

Odot Tamat On

A few days ago I came across the source code for an AGS game, Odot Tamat On, by Zabnat. It has an interesting cartoon art style and with a few minor tweaks I'm able to get the introductory cutscene to run in XAGE:

The number of scripting errors wasn't too high, at 719. It's worth noting that none of the AGS conversions play particularly well at the moment other than Awakener (itself down to 78 errors), but improvements remain iterative and noticeable over time. You can play the original, rhyme-filled AGS version of Odot Tamat On here.

Elsewhere, I've made another revision to the animation system in order to cater for AGS-style views. Each character can now switch between views in order to more easily change the walking or talking animations. The main difference is that views are character-specific rather than from a separate pool that all characters can access. I can understand the reason why they're organised like this in AGS, but as with dialogues/conversations I'm loathe to separate it all to that extent as it seems slightly unintuitive to the end-user. To simplify things I've rename 'Animation Frames' to 'Frames' and 'Custom Animations' to just 'Animations'. Now a script can run both a specific animations or an animation belonging to the current view. This means XAGE can now convert AGS code like cFadi.Loop = 0:

Almost all of the character animations now run perfectly in XAGE, which is a hurdle I'm relieved to have overcome. Once I've completed the following, Awakener will be pretty much done, excluding walkboxes:

• Script Stacking.
• Script parameters and return values.
• Calling scripts in IF/While conditions.
• Timers.
• GUI manipulation.
• Handling special AGS functions ('on_mouse_click, 'repeatedly_execute' etc).

On a related note, Awakener is one of an impressive five games by Ben nominated for the JayIsGames best freeware adventure game of 2009.