Short post I know. That’s where all the emulauncher-xna stuff will be located from now on.
And yes it will look better when it’s done, it’s redonkulous how plain it is right now.
Archive for December, 2008
Yeah, been in another coding slump lately, trying to crack down on getting this damn launcher of mine going but it seems to be dragging the entire way.
The good news is I figured out how to use XNA threading to my advantage – old launcher would lag every time you changed game screens cause it had to load the new boxart. Now it just threads it and shows the blank box-art image until it gets it loaded.
The neutral news is I’m also changing a lot about the way stuff actually works behind the scenes, which means rather than just sorting only by system, it’ll now let you sort by genre, system, alphabetically, or favorites. The Game Maker version could do system or favorites, the XNA3CTP version just system. This’ll be a nice addition I think, in case you just want to play a puzzle game and don’t give a dang about the system – hit up Genre then Puzzle!
The bad news? All two of you who have the old launcher won’t be able to use your XML’s with the new version because of how much has changed over. The good news about this is one of you two is me, the other I don’t think even uses the one he’s got, so we should be okay 
Stay tuned, I’m trying to do a mock-up in photoshop as a general idea of how it’ll show up, plus a screenshot of where it’s at right now (which is basically nowhere).
Whichever one you celebrate (or don’t), hope your holidays are going well!
More details here: http://livewire90210.com/wordpress/home-arcade/ or hit the [Arcade] button at the bottom of the page.
Long story short, I made myself a 2 player 8 button controller for playing my favorite games in. And now I’m remaking a game launcher I had created, cause I want it in C# XNA instead of Game Maker. Have fun reading, more pictures soon as I can snag the camera from my mom – she’s the only one who bought a camera instead of crazy things like this.
Inanis Glass (Click Me!) updated to 1.2, presumably to fix a few rendering glitches and to bump up to 2.7 – there was a hack posted not long ago that I’ve been using to hide a footer glitch, but it broke the w3c validation of the page – 6 errors, 3 “unexpected end of data’s” and 3 “tag not closed.”
So I patched it and guess what – not only did the w3c fix itself, but the blue button in the bottom left has started working (it works in 2.6.5 but originally didn’t in 2.7, or at least not for me). Think it wants javascript, but if you don’t have it on, you’re not missing too much – it lets you change the colors on the theme. If you’ve got cookies enabled it’ll keep it for next visit as well.
For those who need this site to not use as much BW, switch to the “Light” theme; low graphics, like XP set to Windows Classic. If you don’t care, go ahead and pick a theme color!
In the mean time, I’m adjusting a few things and adding a new page set for my Launcher project, which at the moment is going at a snails pace but it -is- moving. Turns out using Google helps turn up tons of tiny bits and pieces, including how to lock objects when threading – I never actually knew how to do it, but now that I do it’ll prevent a particularly nasty crash or glitch when trying to get XNA3 to draw a games boxart when the thread is trying to change from a placeholder to the -actual- boxart after loading it.
So stay frosty and enjoy the theme now that it’s w3c valid and the start corner button works!
So whose bright freakin’ idea was it to scrap my old XNA launcher and recode it from the ground up, AGAIN, just because they got a few ideas that simply don’t work with the old xml’s, the old layout, or pretty much anything that was part of the old system?
*points to self*
More after the break Read the rest of this entry »
Removed a lot of the old SysAlive Release Candidate posts since V1’s up; I left the old PCAlive in case anyone wants it, but frankly you might as well just go SA3 since it looks prettier.
Working on a bit of cleanup as well, but at the moment there isn’t much left to clean up – one of the advantages of posting like once every eon or so
Okay, so far I’m not impressed with the layout of the backend right now, but if it actually does one-click updating like I THOUGHT the others did until I got told to do it myself, I’ll stick with it.
One plugin’s DOA so far, but since its the only one I was using I’m a bit peeved on that too.
Maybe I can get a 2.7 theme I like more than the current one though…Might just have to see what I’ve got.
EDIT: Seems I might just have to like 2.7 a bit more, this theme is friggin’ AWESOME! Now to fix the two images that are totally out of place.
So yeah WordPress 2.7’s available, I’ll upgrade that later this evening.
Got a BIT out of my coding slump, my big progress today is an auto-launcher for a game launcher I put together so I could run my favorite emulated games without having my keyboard nearby. The auto-launcher picks up when I plug in my x-arcade DIY tankstick, and will, once I finish the actual launching part, launch the game launcher so I can launch the games. Seems a bit bass-ackward?
Least I can get the global hotkeys hook installed – that’ll at least let me code it in so when I hit a specific button combination on the xarcade, close the running emulator and return focus to the launcher. The launcher was made in XNA3 which couldn’t do hotkeys cause that’s a form thing or some bull.
Oh, and that launcher I don’t think’ll ever see the light of day; XNA’s a picky bitch when it comes to what can be uploaded and what can’t be. So until I either move to OpenGL or figure out how to draw sprites in straight DirectX when there’s no tutorials on it, launcher going public’s DOA, and frankly that’s got me NOT coding more into it.
So stay tuned for 2.7 I guess, I’m really not looking forward to updating again. It really needs a way to update itself at the push of a button.
So I’m still in a coding slump, mostly cause I’ve been too damn lazy to get VS2008 running on Vista, but also partly cause I’m out of ideas that don’t suck. I figure if I let some of them fester a bit I might actually find a use for them
Edit: Updated wordpress so theres no warning to update when commenting.