Author Archives: badcorporatelogo

About badcorporatelogo

My name is Stephen Styrchak, and I work as a software developer in Seattle, Washington, USA.

XnaCmd for Xbox 360

Posted on September 1, 2012

Today, I’m releasing a command line utility for people working with XNA Game Studio and targeting Xbox 360. This utility is pretty simple and supports four commands: Send a local file to an existing title container on Xbox 360. Delete … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 1 Comment

XNA Game Studio Connect?

Posted on August 26, 2012

It’s been about six months since I last worked on a programming project involving the XNA Game Studio Connect app (required for developing Xbox LIVE indie games). Something must have changed since the last time I used it… How does … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 4 Comments

Double-Precision Arithmetic and XNA Runtime on Xbox 360

Posted on May 7, 2012

I keep working on my hobby project, which is an assembly rewriter whose goal is to optimize assemblies for the XNA runtime on Xbox 360. I probably spend more than half my time debugging obscure errors resulting from invalid CIL … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 2 Comments

Avoid ‘float’ Parameters on Xbox 360 (XNA)

Posted on April 5, 2012

Previously, I said I would describe inefficiencies of the NetCF JIT compiler on Xbox if I could provide a reasonable workaround. This tip is pretty reasonable: avoid using float as a parameter type in function signatures. Use double instead. Here’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, XNA Game Studio | 9 Comments

XNA Code Quality on Xbox 360

Posted on March 10, 2012

More than a year ago, I wrote a tool based on CCI that could inline methods in a CIL assembly. My goal was to provide a means of improving runtime performance of XNA games on Xbox 360, where the JIT … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 2 Comments

Faster Content Builds That Don’t Lock-up Your IDE

Posted on February 19, 2012

Yesterday, I decided to explore what a sufficiently-motivated developer could do to improve content build times in XNA Game Studio 4.0. In a relatively short time, I was able to hack together a solution that distributes content builds across available … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 8 Comments

Improving XNA Reflection-Based Readers and Writers

Posted on February 11, 2012

This post is a bit random. I’m not feeling well today, but I had an idea while staring into space and decided I shouldn’t waste it. I thought about the XNA Content Pipeline, and the convenience of reflection-based serialization. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Building Game Content Makes VS Unresponsive

Posted on March 6, 2011

If you’re halfway serious about making games with XNA Game Studio 4.0, you’ve surely noticed that building any significant amount of game content (textures, audio, etc.) locks up the IDE until the build is complete. Long-time fans of XNA Game … Continue reading →

Posted in XNA Game Studio | 8 Comments

XNA Content Pipeline Debugging (4.0)

Posted on October 31, 2010

It took more work than I expected, but I’ve published my template for debugging the XNA Content Pipeline in XNA Game Studio 4.0. To install and use the template, right-click on the solution node of a solution where you have … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, XNA Game Studio | 20 Comments

Notes on Debugging the XNA Content Pipeline 4.0

Posted on October 30, 2010

In the past, I’ve written about how to debug the content pipeline in Visual Studio 2008 or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition. Last month, while upgrading a bunch of projects and tools to work with Game Studio 4.0, I ran … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, XNA Game Studio | 5 Comments