Monday 20 April 2020

Official Console Support

While the port of Last 'n Furious from AGS had been completed last August, it was a good candidate for getting the first XAGE game out Xbox One.  It needed a bit of work, but not much:

  • Controller support had to be exposed to the game scripts and incorporated into the menus and car handling.  This turned out to be pretty straightforward as the decision was made to simply expose the GamePadState via the scripting interface, as well as a new OnButtonPress event for convenience.
  • Basic Xbox Live functionality (sign in) had to be incorporated in order to pass certification.  This turned out to be slightly fiddly, but from a developer point of view is pretty simple to incorporate into a game.  Under the hood, XAGE has a new basic PlatformService interface that - in theory - can be injected with various common services (e.g. Xbox Live, SteamWorks).  This may be padded out in future to support other common functionality like presence, achievements, leaderboards etc. in a general way, so as not to overly complicate the core game script.

With these changes in place, Last 'n Furious was approved for release on Xbox One (as well as the Windows 10 Store):  https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/last-n-furious/9p3c8dq7qfsh


While the desktop platforms support one-click publish, the UWP equivalent is a bit more involved (Microsoft makes you jump through a few hoops - creating developer accounts, Xbox Live sandboxes etc).  It is all documented on their own site, but I'll work on putting the hooks in place so that XAGE does as much of this for you as it can.  Once this process has been trialled on some of the other ported games, I'll push out an update to XAGE Editor for alpha users.

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