Well, I spent ages fighting with Windows Movie Maker but couldn’t make it do what I wanted, and it seems Adobe Premiere Elements 2 really doesn’t like Vista, so the video I wanted to put up of this will have to wait for a little while.

This basic gist is that I’ve ported the project to the XBox 360, to finally make some use of that Creators Club account I’ve been paying for but getting virtually no use out of for the last couple of years. The code isn’t publically available as it contains a couple of dirty hacks and I haven’t cleaned it up such that it doesn’t affect the Windows codebase yet.

I hit a couple of… interesting issues. The first was that if you set invalid parameters on the vertex/pixel shader or graphics device state, then your first render call will bail out with a driver error indicating that something is wrong, without being terribly helpful about telling you what; it took some experimenting to figure out exactly what combination of parameters the XBox was happy with that didn’t also look like total ass. The other big problem I had was that the XBox version of XNA doesn’t support the GenerateMipmaps() function on textures, which means that if you generate your textures at runtime, you either have to downsample them yourself (and I’m not sure if XNA supports manually generated mipmaps – I’ll have to read into that some more) or have horrible shimmery textures. I eventually went for the third option, which is to cheat and use a premade texture generated by the PC version, and used the content pipeline.

Anyway, the upshot is that it all works – not hugely fast; getting the same sorts of numbers as update 5 on my laptop, but work it does, and that’s quite satisfying, at least.

I really will get some work done on making the buildings look more realistic next, I promise.