I made a multi line writer for outputting stuff to the screen. I tried to copy off God's code, but it unfortunately was pretty rough. God thinks readability is overrated. Anyways, it doesn't actually seem like that hard of a thing, and it isn't, except for one thing..

The friggin newline character! aka: \n

I can't figure out why, but it won't register these buggers. When it parses in the xml files, though, it seems to add in a bunch of \r and \n tags at every carriage return, which is weird that it'd do both… anyways, it sees the \r tags and does a carriage return, but it simply doesn't seem to see the \n character anywhere. I actually added a case statement to alert me if it saw them, but I've gotten nothing.

And yet, because the \n chars are there, they're mucking up the output from the writer. There may be another error (some off by 1 thing) that I can fix, but until I can get rid of these phantom \n chars, it's too hard to figure out. Any ideas?

And hey, can we make the Beta Zyk grey? Because White is kinda cool :-D

It sounds like you've got a good plan pretty much figured out, so just trust your gut on that. I know we disagree on things but I think you've got a really good handle on how this should work ;).

On the other hand, do you want me to write the tutorials? Not saying that you can't do it, but did you have in mind what you're doing? The code for it kinda evolves with what you actually need to do in the tutorial, so I'll have to know what you want.

For example, the idea for tutorial levels is that the player will have to max out an attribute (to demonstrate that trait specifically) before going onto the level. The other stuff will be hidden away. This is sorta your "beta Zyk" idea resurrected (actually, it IS your beta Zyk idea, period). There'll be a white Zyk that grows way faster than normal ones, but only in the given feature. Then the player enters a very short level with a single goal that is able to be reached by having that single maxed out trait. Thus we are showing both the way to increase a trait, as well as showing its in game effect.

The tutorial text pages (I guess you've seen them at this point) will pop up on entering the tutorial level, and the user should be able to bring them back up if they want (via a new button that I'll add). The final page for each tutorial will likely be something like "I've added notes on this subject to your memo file!" or suchlike. They then can access the similar info to what's given in the tutorial in their memos, which, as we've figured, will be stuff on how to raise attributes in the lab, what each attribute means, etc.

As far as triggering memos in the game game, I"ll leave that up to the guys who are working on that half of the game.

If you've been in the music lab or the zykatorium (that's my spelling and I'm sticking to it!), you may have noticed that the zyk doesn't really transform correctly. Mostly, it's because the UpdateTransforms method seems to like working with the incremental changes that are handed each game cycle in the lab or zykatorium. However, I'm not sure how to modify the Zyk model from the original attribute input. So, for example, even though I hand a totally maxed out Zyk in, it looks like a pip-squeak in the lab because it doesn't update the model. It does once you enter the level, but I can't seem to figure out how to achieve this transform for the TestZyk. Gordon, can you help me out here? Thanks!

It was because you had a .png and a .PNG

I love the filler art by the way >:O Haha.

Do any of you guys know how to draw just a part of an image, like what you would do to draw an animation where you just want to draw a small part of the whole texture?

Kevin/Gordon/Sascha… I'm not sure what you did, but the game game runs just fine on my computer now…probably also Chelsea's too then… silky smooth. Sascha said he thinks that it might have been that darn dice texture, but who knows. Point is, don't try to fix it, because it runs nicely now. Excellent stuff!

Whatever it is, iTunes seems to be part of the problem. A lot of trial and error seems to suggest that XNA and iTunes don't play nice with resources somehow or another… so just a suggestion to anybody else who is having this problem is to close itunes and c# express, then reopen just C#. It may solve the problem.

LoaderLock Detected:
Attempting managed execution inside OS Loader lock. Do not attempt to run managed code inside a DllMain or image initialization function since doing so can cause the application to hang.

Since the bug for whatever reason seems to be occurring more often that I can't run the game at all and must just keep trying again and again until it does run with PreferMultiSampling set to true, this is kinda a bit of a problem… is it happening to anybody else?

I think the codebase needs a bit of tweaking with regards to the how Zyk color is handled in the ZykAttributes class. Apart from the fact that there need to be more colors than are listed, I am confused as to the purpose of the "darkColor" flag. As far as I understand it, the Zyk will have a lighter color if a major key is used, and a darker color if the minor key is used, so why is there a flag instead of a more complex system?

-Sascha