Tag: XNA

Play my Xbox Indie Game, Miasma!

Hello,

I’m incredibly proud and somewhat relieved to say that my XNA Indie Game, “Miasma” is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and you can go and play it!

It’s the product of 7 months of obsessive work in my spare time, and gave me the opportunity to make a small but deep strategy game I’d been thinking about for a while.

The gameplay is similar to Advance Wars, Front Mission, and even X-Com, and pits your small team of rebels against a seemingly all-powerful world dominating company.

Here’s a trailer, if you’d like to see it:

You can try the demo version for free if you have an Xbox Live account. Hope you get a chance to try it out, and that you like it!

An ‘official’ announcement of the game is here, at my indie development website ESP Games.

XNA Allocation-free string class

Hello,

I’m developing an XNA game for Xbox and PC, and about half-way through my development cycle I realised I had a problem with memory allocation – or more precisely, with garbage collection.

Garbage Collection (GC) occurs when the XNA framework determines that you have allocated and freed a certain amount of memory (currently 1MB), and attempts to return the freed memory to the system so it can be re-used. It’s a useful and elegant system that makes creating software easy and fun. However, when it comes to performance, especially on the Xbox, it might bite you in the ass. A single garbage collection can cause a stutter in your application, and if this is happening multiple times per second, it’s going to make your app unusable.

So I went through my game and removed all the unnecessary allocation and freeing, and replaced it with static allocation and pools of objects to re-use.

I also created this string class, which uses a static 256 char buffer. It has lots of functions for formatting text and numbers, and a function for getting a plain C# string out of it. I found it very useful… Perhaps you will too? Feel free to use it in your projects.

Remember to make it a member or a static variable, don’t re-create it every frame! And don’t create a silly number of them… Every 4 will cost you (just over) 1KB of memory. 🙂

ESPString.cs

ESP Games is the name of my indie development studio (which is…  me).