XBLA Project

Thurban · Jun 2007

I've started working on a project for the Xbox Live Arcade and I was wondering if anyone else had some experience with the platform.

Any tips, advice, etc. would be great. As far as I know the current cap for the total game file size on XBLA is 150megs. So if anyone has any suggestions or resources for things like target poly count for characters or animation data it is most welcome.

thanks and I'm sure we'll be making a post about it when we get this phase of the project underway.

Rick Stirling · Jun 2007

"target poly count for characters"

For what?

Thurban · Jun 2007

Mega-Man style platformer on the XBLA.

Rick Stirling · Jun 2007

Right, you're getting warmer - the polycount for that will be different than a top down smash TV game, or a virtua fighter clone.

You'll have to take into acount your lighting and textureing - will you be using secualr and normal maps to cary detail, or will it all be polygons? What is the camera distance? What is the art style?

Build a model with a thousand triangle, try it out. If it needs more polygons then put them in. Will it always be a side scroller? can you detail one side more than the other? Will you need fingrs? Facial animation?

Thurban · Jun 2007

right, I'm aware of the different needs based around what type of game it is. I can't go into too much detail until the project lead says it's ok to do so. Really I was just asking around for anyone who has done any work for XBLA before to see what kind of complications they have run into and things of that nature. otherwise thanks for the basic info that we of course will try out.

XBLA has a limit of 150meg file size, so a hero character with 1000 poly's in a Mega-Man style 3D side scrolling platformer may be ok, or may be pushing it. With those kinds of file size caps, most detail will come from diffuse and spec maps. So anyone that may have worked on a previous XBLA game or perhaps a game mod or something with similar restrictions could have very valuable input.

The project is just getting off the ground and it's best to try and foresee any trouble as far ahead as you can.

Joshua Stubbles · Jun 2007

Be thankful they changed it from 50MB to 150MB :P

It really just depends. That's what pre-production is all about. You should be doing tests. Build a full character, and export it in your data format. How large is it?
Same with a level. Build a test level, export it. Check it's filesize.
You have to do tests to learn anything. Pound the hell out of your tech and see how much you can get out of it.

Jay Evans · Jun 2007

Kind of off topic,, and feel free to ignore this if it's distracting from your topic. But, does anyone have any information on how open XBLA is to indy developers? Hypothetically how hard is it for a funded indy developer to get something on XBLA?

Just curious haveing never been exposed to that kind of development.

Thurban · Jun 2007

it depends on if you are planning to sell your game on XBLA or just release it for free. All projects that go up on there are screened and qualified through the XBLA development team. When you join their membership you get access to their team for trouble shooting your project and all sorts of stuff like that as well. I can't find the link I had up the other day but I'll keep looking and post it when I do. It was pretty much everything you could want to know about the process.

EarthQuake · Jun 2007

[ QUOTE ]
right, I'm aware of the different needs based around what type of game it is. I can't go into too much detail until the project lead says it's ok to do so. Really I was just asking around for anyone who has done any work for XBLA before to see what kind of complications they have run into and things of that nature. otherwise thanks for the basic info that we of course will try out.

XBLA has a limit of 150meg file size, so a hero character with 1000 poly's in a Mega-Man style 3D side scrolling platformer may be ok, or may be pushing it. With those kinds of file size caps, most detail will come from diffuse and spec maps. So anyone that may have worked on a previous XBLA game or perhaps a game mod or something with similar restrictions could have very valuable input.

The project is just getting off the ground and it's best to try and foresee any trouble as far ahead as you can.

[/ QUOTE ]

Isnt that a little backwards thinking? Adding extra texture maps to compensate for small file size? Really you can store polygons in very small files, while more and more textures are what will really eat up your budget.

[edit] whoops, i thought i saw normal and spec there, even so if you ahve a strict budget like that diffuse only is probablly your best choice

CrazyButcher · Jun 2007

A game vertex typically "weighs" around 32 bytes (that is 8 times the cost of a compressed pixel in a RGB texture, 4 times of uncompressed RGBA). Be aware so that game vertices are typically a bit more than the vertices in the 3d editor.

A q3 level like q3dm1 would be like 1.4 megs, a car with 10k polys around 450 kb. Just to give some numbers of luxinia's fileformat which is binary, hence tightly packed.

I'd say normally textures eat up stuff faster. I also think EQ is right about the "diffuse" only, it will make the game easier to make, running faster (ie more room to throw out other simple effects), and weigh significantly less.

Richard Kain · Jun 2007

If you're concerned with file sizes, you probably want to look into using the same procedural texture library that was used in RoboBlitz. It's available to developers now, and the tool they use to create the procedural textures (MapZone) is free to download and use. That would help you squeeze down texture sizes as small as possible.

As to polycounts, I wouldn't really worry all that much. XNA supports DirectX 3D files. (the .x format) This format can be compressed and converted into a binary form. (aka, it gets squeezed down a lot, and takes up hardly any space) My advice would be to start off pretty basic, and fill your game with placeholder models and levels. Once you've got the game running really well, you can go back and scale up the graphics and models.

FatAssasin · Jun 2007

I saw a joint talk from the RoboBlitz and MapZone guys at GameFest last year, and it's definitely something worth checking into. The thing to keep in mind though, is that the textures are only compressed until you actually play the game. They still need to get baked into real bitmap files and stored in memory when a level loads. So it's great to keep you under that download limit (which, now that it's bigger may not be as much of a concern), but you still need to test your levels and not go crazy because you can still run out of memory really fast.

gamedev · Jun 2007

Few things that might help - the Xbox supports .DDS files. Much smaller than .TGA's. Be smart about how you texture objects. Not everything needs a normal map. Heck, not everything needs a spec map. Can you combine map channels to save some more space? Think about how you unwrap things as well, re-use textures, share textures for multiple objects etc. We are currently using .FBX files for our engine on a XBLA project. They can get pretty big, especially animation. I've found it's much easier to do 'size' optimization on textures and audio.

And, like everyone else said, just do some tests. See how big your level really will be then go from there.

Good luck!

gamedev · Jun 2007

[ QUOTE ]
it depends on if you are planning to sell your game on XBLA or just release it for free. All projects that go up on there are screened and qualified through the XBLA development team. When you join their membership you get access to their team for trouble shooting your project and all sorts of stuff like that as well. I can't find the link I had up the other day but I'll keep looking and post it when I do. It was pretty much everything you could want to know about the process.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just to clarify, just by getting a XNA creators club membership does not get you access to the XBLA team. You need to formally submit your game / prototype and docs. Once you are greenlit (which is hard), then you will be assigned a team. And weather you are selling you're title or not, you'll have to go through certification, which can be expensive and take quite some time. I think you'll see its going to get harder and harder for indies to get on as the market get flooded. Downloadable games are the new hot thing for both XBLA and PSN.

Good Luck.

Rick Stirling · Jun 2007

As for the texture files, the smallest texture size the 360 supports is a 128x128 (or is it 64x64?...). Anything smaller gets upsampled. It's a hardware 'quirk'.

You can also decide how many miplevels you dds file will support - I forget what the default is, but if an objct is only every seen close up on screen, you don't need to store lots of mip levels, so cleanse them from the file to save space.

Richard Kain · Jun 2007

The seemingly arbitrary 128x128 lower limit isn't really all that much of an issue. XNA makes it very easy to create and use sprite sheets. You can load up a 128x128 map, and then divide it up into a series of smaller maps. This is actually a very common way for handling animated sprites. Of course, you're probably talking about maps to be stretched across 3D models. In that case, I find it hard to imagine a situation where you'd actively want to use a texture smaller than 128x128.

XBLA Project

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