Didn’t have a real good sleep last night, I was dreaming about .NET garbage collection optimisations all night after spending about 12 hours yesterday on them.

The good news is that I’ve cleared them up, the bad new is that they weren’t all that big a problem in the first place… the reason it was glitching on my PC was background processes spiking not garbage collection… bloody Vista!

Anyhow the up side of this work and some transformation updates is that Dirchie Kart is now running at a silky smooth 60 frames per second with 3 player split screen on the XBox 360 (need to buy another controller so I can test 4 player).

I’ve got plenty of spare CPU and GPU time for the rest of the features, which is a pretty good place to be at this stage of the project.

I’ve also recently implemented:

• 5 original Mushroom Cup tracks from the SNES "Super Mario Kart" (for testing only)
• Jump pads
• Boost pads
• Land mines
• Item Pickups (that don’t give you anything just yet)

We’re slowly getting there, stay tuned.

Recently I’ve been searching for inspiration to take Dirchie kart to the next level, after helping Fordy with his crazy ROM hacking exercise to extract the graphics from the SNES version of Final Fantasy 6, I thought,"I wonder if someone has done the same for the original Mario Kart?".

Lo and behold someone has and put them up on the web in convenient 1024 x 1024 png images, perfect to slot into Dirchie Kart.

I’m not planning on using them in the final product just to tune the game mechanics, if I can make it fun with these tracks then I’ll have a good idea how to make fun tracks of my own.

There’s even the battle mode tracks as well, I’ve got plenty to  play with stay tuned…

Last Friday the poXBox  returned home, so first thing I did was fire up Dirchie Kart which was what it was running when it died.

It ran with no hastles and the proceeding multi-player session Kiwi and I had a bit later on that arvo confirmed that the new optimizations I’ve implemented are working like a charm.

Not only did it return in a very timely manner it also came back quieter. It’s not exactly quiet, quiet but it makes a lot less noise than it use to, it’s just quieter than the PC now.

Luckily they also replaced the drive which had started making all sorts of groans and moans.

All in all it was a pain in the arse but not as painfully as it could have been!

I’ve settled on a name for the new bad guy, Mad Moorey!

I Chipped away at this little fella over the weekend, he’s pretty dumb, just runs at you and bumps you around. It’s amazing how the rough texturing come up with the animation and cel shaders.

It would seem that the Xbox 360 is not machine enough to handle the technical excellence that is Dirchie Kart!

Yes I got the dreaded red ring of death half way through testing the new optimised collision code in Dirchie Kart, the poxbox is caput.

Wish me luck trying to get it fixed over here, would probably have more luck myself with a soldering iron and six pack of beers… 🙁

I had been holding off doing a full cel shaded effect for Dirchie Kart, it’s been done before and I was hoping to come up with something more original.

I figured it suits the graphic style so much I’d better have a look… It looks so good particularly with the vertex animations that it’s definitely got to stay.

With the announcement that Microsoft are going to sell the XNA community games over XBox live I figure it’s time to reveal the super secret skunkworks XNA project I’ve been working on.

Up to 1 to 4 player split screen, co-op or competitive cart action on XBox or PC. Most of the graphics are just place holders at the moment, but I’ve got some pretty good tech going on in the shaders that open the door to some game play ideas.

Every object in the game can:

• Be animated by one of many vertex shader routines.
• Have the amplitude and frequency of this animation individually controlled.
• Have it’s a colour saturation manipulated (from grey scale to colour).
• Mask out areas of the texture to a colour (ie specific parts can change colour).

Game modes I want to include:

• Paint the town, where everything starts gray scale and you have to paint the level with your Dirchies colour (maybe have a specific colour that you have to collect first).
• Race…standard Kart affair but with more bad guys.
• Battle, you need to keep your Dirchie meter above zero (Dirchie meter indicated to other players by your saturation level)
• Survival, help each other reach the end of a level filled with bad guys.
• DDR, Dirchie Dance Revolution, something where you collect notes or something that make the level dance… I dunno.

The other thing I want to introduce is a award/punishment/vote system so you can bag each other out at the end of each round.

If you’ve got any suggestions for game modes, weapons or awards/punishments leave me a comment.