More Midnight Ideas
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
Seems these last late night dealios are making my life hell. I’m not sure why I got these new ideas, but now that I did I’m inclined to act upon them. And frankly they’re IRRITATING THE HECK OUT OF ME! I mean, sure, I never did finish the profile system, but thats back from XNA 3.0 CTP, when you COULDN’T release anything with it legally.
Now that we’re in XNA 3.0 release, I’ve actually got a reason to get profiles working – I probably won’t use them much, but someone just might find a use for it, so I better code it in.
But it seems my imagination took the little bit of slack I gave it, stretched it across the planet, and tied its shoes with it. Now I’m making a profile ‘gamercard’ just so some random addons come into play, like colored stars in the upper left that indicate, at a glance, your favorite genre and how many hours you’ve sank into it (4 red stars = 50 hours of fighting games, 1 blue means 5 hours of action, etc). Not to mention a playrank so you can tell at a glance how much time you’ve spent gaming; got a 1 there? You need to get yourself a girl and stop gaming, or you need to game more so the guy with a 2 doesn’t catch up.
Then there’s the shop, because my imagination loves the idea of avatars similar to a Mii (for the uninitiated, that’s what Nintendo calls the Wii avatars) on the card, where you spend GamerBucks (earned by playing more games or playing them for a preset amount of time) to buy hats, facial hair, new shirts, new backgrounds, and even new colors for the frame of the card, so you aren’t stuck with Basic Gray.
And if that wasn’t enough to make me go insane, I realized I never did any of the playdata I wanted in the older launchers. This one’s got a list of displayable playdata 13 items long, not including the amount of space that’ll get sucked up in the XML’s just storing the data; I might end up figuring out this Serializing stuff to make my life less of a living hell!
Add in Parental Lock controls and a “Token” system for limiting time wasted on games, and I’ve got more on my plate than I can snarf down in a week, let alone a month. For the curious (all 2 of you 
), Token system = ## Minutes per Token, so if you play Primal Rage and PR requires 1 token for every 15 minutes and you play for 30, you’ve used 2 tokens. Could be used as a reward system in some households I guess, if you log in as your profile, head to config, and award the kids some tokens for good behavior or whatnot. Course they might just start the emulator on their own in which case they got totally around it, but that’s another side project I’m tweaking still – a helper application, as it were.
And the cherry on top? Just cause just about everything has them nowadays, achievements. I figure I might as well jump on the bandwagon sooner or later, plus whats the fun of an insane amount of playdata if I’m not going to give you a badge for playing Super Craptastic Game for 10 hours, or for topping 250 total hours in gaming, or for playing 100 different games for 30 minutes or more each?
So uh, yeah, assuming I stay focused correctly, this might be done by my birthday in August.
Just kidding. But not really. Here’s the completed list so far:
-MediaPlayer so it plays music while you navigate the menus.
Not so much finished, but on the up-side, I’ve done this like 3 times already – one in Game Maker, one in windows forms, and one in XNA 3.0 CTP. At least I can reuse the knowledge I learned from my total ****ups before, right?