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?

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!

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!

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

Does anybody see some sort of encapsulation problem with putting it in util instead of keeping it privately within MusicMonsters?

Also, I figured the sort of non-linear progression should work as such

Level …..Amount
1……………1
2……………3
3……………6
4…………..10
5…………..15

Has anyone figured out how to place items in the code that are only compiled in debug mode? It's accomplished via preprocessor directives in C++, but I don't think you can use the same method in C#, and a quick search doesn't reveal too much in the way of help.

This gives you the basic rundown of how xml commenting works in c#. But mostly what you need to know is to place "///" before a member of a class to get the automatic tags. <summary> and <param> are pretty self explanatory. Use <remarks> at the top of classes instead of <summary>.

That's about all there is to it.

 b = b + 10 //b is a byte 

…doesn't fly. Compiler error. So… I says to myself I says… well I'll just overload the "+" operator for byte and integer args. No such luck. I tried to do it in the util.cs file. It seems that you can't just do that with integral types for both args. One parameter at least must be a class. Is this normally the case with other languages as well? And anybody see a way around this? It's not critical, but I'm looking to avoid massive amounts of explicit casting that will clutter up the code. Here is the failed method.

 //C# doesn't allow implicit byte operations //such as "b = b + 10" where b is a byte. Used in MIDI data public static byte operator+(byte a, int b) { int c = (int)(a) + b; if (c > 255) throw OverflowException("The requested byte addition was over 255"); else if (c < 0) throw OverflowException("The requested byte addition was less than 0"); return (byte) c; } 

The error was "One of the parameters of a binary operator must be the containing type". It would seem that this could work if I could add the overload to the "Byte" class… C# uses actual objects for each integral type… so things like "int" are just shortnames for the actual objects. However, you can't mess with that stuff for obvious reasons.

http://blogs.msdn.com/garykac/articles/732007.aspx

Go to there to learn how to use it. The code is on the SVN site as well as demos. You may not actually need to make the font yourself (which is fairly easy), but using them is probably something we'll all do, so be sure you know how.

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/MIDIToolkit.asp#StateMachineToolkit

It seems to offer what we need, though I'm not sure if it will allow keyboard midi input… in fact midi input in general is still a mystery to me. Another one with less documentation:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/usersamples/details.aspx?sampleguid=89cde290-5580-40bf-90d2-5754b2e8137c

Seems more basic, but as I said, not too much doc. I'll ask the creators if they mind our using their work soon if one of these shows promise, or hey maybe we'll use something else entirely, or just use built in c#… tell me what you think.