This week's blog post is probably not going to be quite as long as the past couple of weeks, as not quite as much has happened in the past week. This upcoming Monday, the new capstone tracks are going to begin rolling out, and with them, we will be trying to entice more students to make their own game engine using Gateware. And a big selling point we want to provide for using Gateware is that it is compatible with UWP, meaning it can run on various Microsoft devices, including newer generations of Xbox. So Lari And Carlos are wanting me to have an example project made and running on Xbox by the big presentation on Monday.
I began working on a showcase project last Friday a bit, but so far, I have had to completely restart two or three times so far for various. One of the first restarts happened because I was using an assignment from a previous class and building off of that and adding extra functionality to show off more of the capabilities of Gateware, but I later learned that they don't want me to use previous assignments in case future students somehow find the template and use it complete their projects. After that, I started using examples already provided to students and building off of them. The last restart, however, happened because I learned a little too late that the example uses external libraries that aren't compatible with UWP, so we had to scrap that one.
But now we're on to the most recent showcase project, and so far, it is looking far more promising than the previous attempts. I was able to create a CMake to build the project as a UWP project, and just today, I was finally able to get it running on an Xbox, with some slight problems, though. Currently, the project is just a cube floating in space that you are able to spin around with some controls, but I'm hoping to at least add some file I/O and some music playing to show off those capabilities. The problem I mentioned earlier is that when the application runs on Xbox, the image gets extremely blown up, so it's like the camera is super zoomed in. I haven't had much time to look into it yet, so maybe it's not really that big of an issue.
In more exciting news, we were able to manually compile the UWP version of Gateware into its single header form! It took some time to get working and some finagling with GCompiler to get it working, but now it is. Also, because of some of the said finagling, GCompiler will hopefully now be more accepting of the UWP version of Gateware when the time for automatic compiling comes along, but we're still a week or two away from that.
Well's pretty much it for this week. Not quite as exciting as the past couple of weeks, but we've still got some progress being made, and we're still moving forward. Hopefully, next week's post will have a bit more excitement to it as we enter into the final month of my capstone with Gateware. Hopefully, I'll be able to get this UWP thing fully integrated into the main branch before I check out. Fingers crossed.
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