It’s now in the XNA Creator’s Club PlayTest section (if you are a member and have access feel free to help us test it).
We’ll run it there for at least a day, and if nothing comes up we’ll be heading into Peer Review.
Sent it last night and finally got some sleep after 3 days!
Check out our newest interview posted on gigaloth.com.. It’s about releasing on XBLIG and some of the stuff we’ve found going through that.
Excerpt:
“In order to sell on XBLIG, you need access to the audience. That means you are either on the New Release list, you are on the Most Popular list, you are paying to advertise on the Dashboard, or your game is just cool enough that your first round of buyers (during the release list period) are telling their friends and convincing them to buy it. In other words: Release, Most Popular, Advertise or Viral. Advertising is probably out of the picture, at least at first. It
As we’re very near releasing a second update to XenoMiner, I’d like to make a quick post answering some questions we get all the time via Facebook, Twitter and email:
Is XenoMiner being actively updated?
It is. We continue to work to improve the game and mature it towards our original vision and goals.
WILL THERE BE MULTIPLAYER?!
Indeed! In fact we have working development builds of Multiplayer Xenominer and are currently in the process of debugging and fleshing out the experience. Naturally multiplayer changes touch nearly every bit of code, so we’ve been taking our time to get it right.
Will there be glass?
Yes, in fact, it’s in the update that we are just now wrapping up. There will be regular glass and frosted glass, and we’ve made the crystals semi-transparent.
What new features can we expect next?
Well, this one will be outdated fast, but: Glass, Retractable Doors/Bridges/Walls (with switches and conduit), Thruster Pack (jetpack for suit), Binocular vision on helmet, Zoomable minimap, Tabbed/Sorted Centriforge, Reclaim old gear (trash and recycle stuff for materials), Pointer back to Spawn, Transparency for Crystals, a new Texture set by LithiumSound, the maker of the incredibly popular “Summerfields” Minecraft texture pack, and perhaps a bit more …
How do I use the bot?
The joy of discovery is deep and the opportunity for it is fleeting. For those less patient, see this post (warning, SPOILERS)
Who did your music, it is awesome?!
Lucid Darqly and his project group xXRx let us use some samples, and Lucid made some of it custom for us. Check out their album here:
http://www.fixtstore.com/product/89694/xXRx—333-Ch2-%28MP3-Album%29
Will you be doing a PC version?
Because XNA runs on PC natively (well, with some .NET packages), it is very likely we will release a PC version sometime in the medium term. We are currently focusing on the Xbox experience and multiplayer and will continue to put our energies there until we are satisfied with its progress.
Is DAI-SE a reference to HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
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Is there a Wiki?
Yep! wiki.xenominer.com
As anyone who has developed multiplayer games is well aware, most of the issues come down to maintaining state. As players interact with the world, there’s a balance that has to be struck between a snappy, responsive user experience and the state validation and propagation.
When any given request in a client-server setup could require anywhere from 40 to 400 milliseconds to complete, you have to do some fudging, and it’s handling cases where your guesswork failed that really take some solid engineering. Alternately, a peer-to-peer approach gives saves you half that trip in time, but adds a host of complexities to state management that make it just as difficult to use effectively. Add on top of this that the Xbox system through XBLIG can only handle about 40 kb/s throughput, and you find yourself jumping through an incredible number of hoops to send as few packets and as little data as possible at any given time. The amount of engineering that has to go into making a Multiplayer experience on the Xbox (as opposed to standard PC or web) is enormous, and easily more obtuse by an order of magnitude.
That isn’t to say any of these things are new problems, or obstacles related only to our development or that make multiplayer for XenoMiner unique – they’re the shared pains of the entire community, as can be seen on multiple threads and how-to’s when you do a few pointed searches. Some games handle it more effectively than others, we’re shooting for a smooth, efficient and accurate system for the players which has of course required more thought and more time.
