XNA Creators Club: Deploying your game to an Xbox

Here at VANGOGH lab we’ve been provided with a XBOX 360 and a XNA Creators Club account so that we can develop XNA applications for the console. Deploying an XNA application to an Xbox is fairly straightforward, and there is a nice video available that explains the process step-by-step. Nevertheless, I thought I’d post my own explanation for those of you without the time for a video:

1. Install XNA Game Studio Express on PC

Go here for the details

2. Connect a Xbox and PC to the same subnet

For your PC and Xbox 360 to communicate, they need only be on the same subnet. In other words, they both need to be connected to your router, or to active Ethernet jacks at your school. This would probably not work through a connection service like UMBC’s ResNet.

3. Sign up for a XNA Creators Club Membership

You will need an Xbox Live account to do this. You can either buy the membership from the marketplace, or if you have a token for the service, you can enter it where it says ‘redeem code’. To buy it on your Xbox, you’ll find the option in the XNA Creators Club tab among the game downloads available.

4. Download the XNA Game Launcher onto Xbox

Just as you did to subscript to the XNA Creators Club, go to tab of the same name among the game downloads in the Marketplace.

5. Generate a Connection Key within Launcher

Once you have the Launcher, you’ll find it in the games ‘blade’. Launch it, and select ‘Settings’. Here you need to generate an encryption key for communication between your Xbox and PC. Generate one, write it down, and then press A to accept the key.

6. In XNA Game Studio, open list of available Xbox 360 consoles

Select select Tools->Options within XNA Game Studio Express. This will open the options window. Check ‘show all settings, and select Xbox 360 within the XNA Game Studio Express tab on the left.

7. Add an Xbox, using the provided Key

You will see a empty list of available Xbox 360 consoles. Click the Add button, and a new window will open up to allow you enter a name for the new xbox, and the key provided for you by the XNA Game Launcher. You can test the connection using this key by following the next step, and then clicking the ‘Test Connection’ button. If this is successful, your Xbox and PC are now able to communicate. Click ‘Ok’ to finish adding the Xbox.

8. Select ‘Connect to Computer’ within Launcher

Go back to the main menu of the Launcher, and select ‘Connect to Computer’. The screen should now read ‘waiting for computer connection’.

9. Run Xbox project within XNA Game Studio

Open a Xbox XNA project, compile and run it. The Xbox should display the names of files being sent to it from your PC, and once done, the application will immediately launch on the Xbox.

And that’s it. Now that you’ve sent a project to the Xbox, you can always rerun it by selecting the ‘My Games’ tab on the main menu of the XNA Game Launcher, and then selecting the game you’d wish to run. Once you’ve sent one build of an application over to the Xbox, small fixes will result is far less deployment time. Have fun working with XNA!

Try the Ratatouille

I saw Ratatouille this weekend, the new animated film from Pixar. Unsurprisingly, it was topnotch in every aspect, and I recommend it to everyone. They chose the very ambitious combination, of an 3D animation perspective, of a kitchen setting and fuzzy protagonist, and the result is absolutely amazing. On top of being a purely technological success, I personally think its the funniest Pixar film to date; the premise is simply rich with hilarious visual gags. Since the teaser, which implied it would be a simple slice life story from a food-loving rat, the film developed into the slightly surprising narrative of a rat thrown into a human world that has a incredible talent to cook. It seems just about every animated film is about the daily lives of intelligent animals living in makeshift communes, so the change of pace is refreshing. There is a nine minute sneak peak available, so check that out if you’re not sold.

Global Illumination using Large Point Light Sets

I thought it might be of interest to VANGOGHer’s and others that a paper very similar to Josh Barczak’s M.S. thesis from last year has been accepted for publication at Eurographics Symposium on Rendering.  The paper is “Incremental Instant Radiosity for Real-Time Indirect Illumination” by Laine, Saransaari, Kontkanen, Lehtinen and Aila. Based on the Instant Radiosity idea of using many point lights as sources of bounce lighting, both works save/discard point lights based on some criteria so that the set of lights doesn’t need to be recalculated every frame that the light source moves. Both are worth a read, but this recent one is probably more manageable in non-thesis form.
Link through level of detail: Shameless self-promotion

Jeremy

Illustration-inspired Visualization

Illustration-inspired visualization deals with generating visualizations of real-world data that mimic manual illustrations drawn by highly trained artists.

A SIGGRAPH 2007 paper titled Interactive Cutaway Illustrations of Complex 3D Models from Li et al. does an excellent job of generating visualizations that have a hand-drawn look as well as allow the viewer to interact with the data. Here is one of many excellent images from their paper

Particularly interesting is their authoring tool, that allows users to create many different labeled illustrations of the same data.

Illustration principles such as edge shadows and edge shading have been used very effectively to give a hand-drawn look-and-feel to their generated illustrations.

Some other interesting papers in the field of cutway illustrative visualization are:

• BRUCKNER, S., AND GROLLER, M. 2006. Exploded views for volume data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 12, 5 (Sept./Oct.), 1077–1084.
• CORREA, C., SILVER, D., AND CHEN, M. 2006. Feature aligned volume manipulation for illustration and visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 12, 5 (Sept./Oct.), 1069–1076.
• MCGUFFIN, M. J., TANCAU, L., AND BALAKRISHNAN, R. 2003. Using deformations for browsing volumetric data. In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2003, 401–408.

Please feel to comment on these or any other papers that I may have missed and I will be happy to update the blog accordingly.

Getting cellular with it

Admittedly, these are “exciting” times. So, the tendency is to get carried away. Mea culpa on that charge. But seriously…..

Since there are a number of guys in the lab who are interested in/working on things Cell BE, I thought I’d put in my 2 cents. IBM has a good simulator and SDK for development on the cell architecture. However, new code and support base is just trickling in. One of the good starter resources is CellPerformance. From the sight of it, I have to log some long hours micromanaging some of my code for surgical simulation.

Oh, and a shoutout to one of our flag-bearers at AMD, Jeremy, who runs his own blog on WordPress, LevelOfDetail, about matters graphics.

The littlest birds : Novint Falcon for sale

Falcon finally released the Novint Falcon, a cheap haptics device they hope will penetrate the video game industry. Priced at 189, it’s actually much cheaper than the professional models, but I don’t think its cheap enough to market to gamers. Certainly it’s cool technology, and has real applications in medical simulation and education, but personally I don’t feel it adds enough to gameplay to warrant that price tag. I’m always asking myself “How would this work in a game?”, but after playing around with haptics I didn’t come to any revelations. That said, from what I read about the mini-games that come with this device, Falcon has put serious effort into bridging the gap between gaming and haptics. Force feedback, as in rumble or vibrating technology, has become a big business in the form of cell phones, game consoles and arcade machines, so thinking haptics isn’t far removed. Its just going to have to cost next to nothing before it will work in this industry.

Also, could they have thought of a less comfortable way to hold your hand for long periods of time?

Inception

Welcome to the VANGOGH lab blog! We’ve been kicking around the idea to start one for some time, and well… today we have. Every student in the lab is invited to post about whatever graphics related news/findings they wish. For those of you who have stumbled upon this blog from the digital wilderness and know nothing about us, please visit our website.