Game Dev Livelog (3/9/14)

The Livelog is a live blog of my work. I re-publish every time I add something, so keep checking back.

Today is going to be a full day of development, so there has never been a better time to begin the Livelog series. I plan to work on Project: AA (fixing shooting bugs, and implementing telemetry) and Project: Futana (adding the menus).

For those who haven't read my IA Plans post, Livelog is a series where I give my thoughts in word form, as I am programming, as opposed to Devlog, where I give said thoughts post-development. As such, this series is a lot more open, and gives a better view at how my mindset is whilst programming, however it probably isn't as educational, or readable.

11:04 AM-
I am working on the telemetry for Project: AA. I made a 'slight' mistake, and ended up creating 50GB txt files, so I am re-implementing it both asynchronously, in a better format, and not writing 60 times a second.

12:13 PM- I implemented the base telemetry using File IO, but the menu stopped working. After debugging for about 30 minutes, I realized that the issue was the telemetry. This is INFURIATING. EVERYTHING I DO BREAKS THE MENU. I need to find a new way to implement this without breaking the menu. Me thinks that I will just call this in Update only one, rather than right after the Load Content.

12:17 PM- That didn't work. It is the act of using File IO that is breaking the menu.

12:20 PM- Nevermind, the issue is actually with the fact that I am calling Game1 from Telemetry and using a literal string for my game version. Easy fix, and now the menu works, and the getting game version. Now I need to get FPS, and player game duration. Mostly Player Game Duration.

1:18 PM- I got Telemetry done. I had to move my gathering of Player Game Duration as an int to my Telemetry class, because I cant call Game1 from Telemetry. Other than that, it works fine. I now gather the version number, and duration of playthroughs in frames and seconds. Now I can gather useful information from biased friends.

Now I am working on getting Amazon Web Services set up, and then I will do the Windows Phone port of the telemetry.

2:13 PM- I took a break, and now I am back to development. I added the ability to detect whether the user is using a gamepad or not, and report it back with the telemetry. I just added an if GamePad is connected, Stream.WriteLine. Next is the score. This will be difficult, because I cant call Game1 from Telemetry.

Also, I just realized a new format for this. I will publish it everytime I revise it, so as to make it live.

2:56 PM- I got score working with  the telemetry. I just moved the score declaration to Data.cs, and now it works perfectly. I think I have all the data I need. I could attempt to get FPS, but I don't really want to do that at this point.

3:08 PM- I added functionality that will delete the txt containing the data if it is larger than 1 gigabyte. If it fails to delete for some reason, it wont delete it, as to not cause errors.

3:15 PM- I need to set up the connection to the servers, and then make this work for WP and its isolated storage. I will not be doing any data collection on the Xbox 360 platform.

Well, that's the liveblog for now. I will be back to development later today. I am going to go for a walk, and do some other things.