Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'release'

Kodu Patch 1 is Live!

eanders — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We're excited to hear what you think of it.

The well-known sharing sessions should be visible in the share hub screen later this evening.

-Eric

Kodu patch 1 has entered peer review

mattmac — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Health bars of linked-clones did not properly expand when the number of hit points was increased.
Magic brush is no longer active when starting a new empty world, if it was the active brush in the previous world.
Autosave files occasionally stopped showing up.
Start button now toggles the mini-hub.
Sound effect while moving nodes up and down was being triggered too often.
Splash sound effects were being over triggered when water depth was very shallow.
Carried objects now match the couriers’ orientation.
Added an option to always invert the camera.
Mute now only mutes pre-canned sounds, not programmable sounds.
Fixed typo in Path help.
The Soccer Ball thought it could be programmed to move.
Zoom still occurred when in programmatic first person mode, which was disorienting when going back into chase cam.
Crash when opening the virtual keyboard with too long of a string.
Crash when opening example [say] tile from the programming help.
Crash while sharing with friends whose GamerTag’s used unsupported characters.
Softlock when adding more than 8 Lights.
Rock Band/Guitar Hero controllers caused the camera to spin.
Reset World was resetting scores.
Gaps in expressible numbers. You can now use up to 10 tiles, as well as several more number tiles.
The On Water sensor did not work correctly.
Only the first created object emoted.
Launching held objects did not work correctly.
Bots are now able to inflict zero damage.
Various graphical fixes in the Help screens.
"Technique: Change Behavior" showed two win messages.
The player did not lose in "Turnover", when the stick ate Black Apples.

Creatable objects now spawn at their creator’s height.
Don’t play the speech audio effect if the say bubble string is empty.
Corrected Wisp collision radius.
Camera was stuck in fixed offset while game is paused.
There was a problem with the mine’s animation blend weights.

Fixed a crash that would occur if the Xbox ran out of disk space while writing a file. A warning pops up now stating what's happened, and how to fix it.
Detect failure of storage media to prevent disappearing world issue.
Updated Gawlf: Classic Links so that the Kodu no longer displays shield effects.

Blips could leak through walls

Removed unused audio files to free up space.
Slowed down the rate that land is raised and lowered.

Increased the maximum number of programming pages to 12.
Ability to send worlds to friends in a sharing room if they have allowed others to do so.
Added “favorite” world tag.
Option to auto-download worlds marked with favorite tag.
The active tile in the options helix is now highlighted.
Increased the maximum health cap to 1000.
Increased the maximum speed that characters can travel.
Added 26 more score buckets based on the (English) alphabet. These scores are always invisible.
Ability to turn off collision, damage and healing effects.
Tweak to turn objects invisible (not visible to the user, other bots can still see them).
Tweak to make objects ghosted out (able to pass through anything, and are translucent).
If both Invisibility and Ghosted are set, the object will be completely invisible. :)
Added a dabber tool to make it easy to select terrain types.
Terrain types used in the current world are now placed at the beginning of the terrain picker.
Worlds now contain a credit listing of who worked on them. This is accessed in the World Options screen.
Ability to edit world tags in the Load World menu.

Added glyph for soccer ball: [ball], [soccer ball] (replace square brackets with angled. this editor won't let me use chars that look like html tags).
Added per-character tweak options to adjust the distance used by the “close by” and “far away” sensor filters.
Added per-character tweaks for acceleration values.
Added world tweak option to hide resource meter during gameplay.

Well-known sharing sessions can be joined without a friends list entry, allowing beginners to upload levels and download hand-picked levels without becoming friends

Special Ship Week Desktop

mattmac — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We survived, we launched, people are doing awesome stuff with it. We've got some bugs (many fixed,) and a patch in the works, but it's all looking quite good.

Here's to all our new friends...

Kodu is Live!

mattmac — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We shipped last night!

For those wondering, the Kodu team doesn't do the ship process. It left our hands when we submitted it for review, where our community reviewed it and it then went into the "ingestion" process for XBox Live Marketplace. This involves men in black suits wearing sunglasses and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember.

But here we are, after a good two and a half years from a conversation around a dinner table to Techfest, PDC 2008, CES 2009, trials in 20 countries with dozens of schools and hundreds of individuals, five million demos, a few setbacks, and some mind-blowing surprises.

Folks have already made levels far more sophisticated than anything the team has done or anticipated. I'll try to feature some particularly cool creations here on this blog in the days and months ahead.

Thanks so much to our supportive inner circle - you know who you are. And a particularly massive thanks to Lili Cheng, who kept the lights on the whole time and believed in us even through the most difficult parts.

Pick yourself up a copy! I'm buying my own today.

Purchase link problems being addressed

mattmac — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

The Community Games Folks have found a problem in the purchase links - purchasing from the console should now work and they're hard at work on the web purchase link. I'll update here as we learn more.

Kodu Review is Complete

mattmac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Please stand by - it's looking good, but no promises until the jury returns to the courtroom.

Kodu: What to Expect

mattmac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Thanks so much everyone for helping us launch our little fledgling to such a receptive audience. As folks are getting excited and waiting on the ETA (me too!,) I thought it would be a good time to calibrate some expectations. Kodu is far and away the coolest project I have ever worked on - it'll be tough to top in the next 25 years of my career in software, but it is a 1.0 so it's good to understand what's there.

1. It is programming. Kodu's a real, albeit small and specialized language. Simple things are very simple to do, and complex things are possible. If you want to do something super-complex, you will have a learning curve, but nothing like what you'd see with a conventional programming language.

2. It can't do absolutely everything. We managed to squeeze in just enough (mainly camera support) for side-scrolling games, but there are still little annoyances: for example, you can make roads float in the air, (such as for a jumping game) but if two roads cross over each other, you can only place objects on the higher road. Annoying; we just didn't get to it.

3. The characters all move differently to support different design goals. If you're into fast, twitchy action, go with the saucer, wisp, or puck, all of which can turn on a dime and accelerate very quickly. Most of the other characters are a little slower, some a lot.

4. Everything has a cost. Sometimes some fairly simple things can be kind of expensive when the game is running. We try to warn you when you've got to much going on in your world - look for the thermometer - but we err on the side of letting you go for it, so it's up to you to keep things running smooth by trading off how you're using different features. For example, if you have a bunch of characters that are all trying to look at each other (using the "see" sensor,) they'll be doing a lot of expensive tests against the terrain. This applies to other things as well: for example, if you drop 50 coins in a level and program them all to react when bumped, they're all doing a little bit of thinking each frame that really adds up. Better to program the character to detect the coins, so you only have one brain running rather than 50. Hint: hearing is more efficient than seeing, because it doesn't have to check if something's blocking.

5. It's a 1.0 from a small team. We do work at Microsoft, but the Kodu team (design, dev, and test) is only six people. I'm sure we missed something. We are standing by to fix any bugs the minute they appear and to flip a service build quickly if necessary. I've been in software long enough to be quite sure we'll need a refresh at some point.

6. If you've been in the playtest or review, your worlds will not be available in the retail version. This is a security thing on the Xbox 360; we can't do anything about it. If it helps, I've rebuilt dozens of levels many times. You get pretty fast at it.

7. The built-in games are just a start. We've put a good double handful of prebuilt content, all built by the team and our early testers. We expect you can do way better. We have designed each of these worlds to show some realistic techniques. We'll be doing some deconstructing of these levels on the blog so you can see why we "did it like that." It's our hope that you can find the world that is closest to what you're thinking of, and then go from there.

8. Kodu is for making small games. We considered many features that would support very large worlds and very long campaigns, but were very conscious that the toolset stay simple and streamlined. Some of these calls were wrong, but we are very happy with the balance we came up with - a set of quick, simple tools for making very cool small games. If you're careful with performance, you can make significantly larger worlds, but you're not going to make Gears 3 with Kodu 1. Haiku is a word that comes to mind. Here again the built-in levels show you some of the tradeoffs you can make.

9. Use the tweak screens. Select a character and press <x>, or go to the world settings tool (far right in the tool palette.) These let you change a lot of nerdy - and very useful - things like the sky color, basic lighting scheme, character speed, bullet speed, smoke trails on your missiles, and lots more.

10. You are Kodu. The success of Kodu depends entirely upon what people build with it. I have been really surprised by what people have pulled off with it already, and supremely delighted to see the level of buzz in the community. It's out of our hands now, and we are counting on all of you to realize the dream of the Kodu omniverse. We're all just getting started...

No news tonight

mattmac — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I promised my wife a night out and you don't mess around with that. I'll see what tomorrow brings...no more posts tonight - rest those F5 keys...

Kodu Released to Peer Review

mattmac — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

We put Kodu into peer review about one minute ago.

This means that independent developers who belong to Microsoft's XNA Creator's Club will be reviewing Kodu for basic stability, appropriate content, and copyright issues.

If they find a serious bug, we'll fix it and restart the process.

If all goes well, once a certain number of developers sign off on it it will go live for sale on the XBox. The soonest this could happen is Tuesday the 30th as it takes about 48 hours after approval to reach the service.

If we do hit problems, I'll give an update here. We've been so through many different permutations I'd be surprised if we found a bug that took more than an hour to fix.

The team has been working all weekend chasing down all kinds of increasingly tiny fixes. No major last-minute earthshakers, but a few interesting twists.

It's looking really good, but we're all super-tired.

But not too tired for a new desktop!

Once we clear peer review I've got a tour of the sharing system. It's a peer-to-peer sharing system with your friends list. If folks want to swap levels, my gamerTag is RandomWave - feel free to friend me - I'd love to gather cool levels from folks.