Axiom DBP

I want to participate for the Dream.Build.Play http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx is it possible to use the Axiom engine for a game for DBP?

[Borrillis]

Well, DBP 2010 is closed and DBP 2011 has yet to be announced.

However, The XNA renderer is capable of running on the XBox and therefore you could write a game using it, and submit it for the next DBP. There are limitations in the Xna Renderer, most of which can be solved by using custom shaders over the generated ones. Any other problems we would like to have resolved by the next DBP.

If the next DBP requires XNA 4.0, then that's an entirely different story, one we haven't written yet.

OK, thank you

Funny, I'm hoping to enter my dungeon crawler in the same contest (if it's to happen again)
Yeah, getting Axiom onto the xbox is a little annoying, but once you're there it's a lot of fun.

[Borrillis]

Funny, I'm hoping to enter my dungeon crawler in the same contest (if it's to happen again)
Yeah, getting Axiom onto the xbox is a little annoying, but once you're there it's a lot of fun.

Please let me know what the pain points are. I would love to get feedback so I can make the process easier.

One word...

Shaders *shakes fist angrily*

My fail, more than anything, but one of the great features of Axiom/OGRE is the ability swap render systems without too much hassle, and I find it a little sad that all the material scripts have to be altered to be ran on the 360.

I notice that when I forget to edit the material script, the draw error states something like "a valid vertex and pixel shader, or effect must be set on the device."

I was wondering if a BasicEffect couldn't be generated at runtime?
Apologies if you've already thought of this, I'm just throwing it out there.

[Borrillis]

We can, and do that for XNA on Windows. Actually we generate a Vertex/Pixel Shader pair. However, The XBox does not support ( or have ) Shader Compilation, this is true for all XBox games. The shaders must be compiled before being deployed to the device. We do try to help out here. If you run your game using XNA on Windows, There is a setting to write the generated shaders to disk. You then run through your game, and the Shader Generator will dump the Vertex/Pixel Shaders to disk, you then have the wonderful (sic) task of pairing those shaders to the materials and creating the correct vertex_program and fragment_program entries for them.

I'd like to make this even smoother, but this is a first pass at it.

hmm, must unfortunate this is. But I suppose it's pretty sweet getting it on the xbox at all.

Edit: Something that would be really nice, is in the generated shader, if a comment could be added as to which material(s) they're supposed to be matched with. Right now I'm using TexturedLight1.hlsl from the xbox demos for all my models.

Looks like Dream Build Play will be recurring for 2011. http://dreambuildplay.com/Main/Home.aspx
The past years the prize has been $40,000 to create an Xbox 360 game. I'd love to be able to use Axiom for this. Unfortunately it requires Xna 4.0, so the XNA renderer would have to get updated, but I'm more than willing to help with that.