I was so busy with many other things, that I did not had any time for Zune things... I have been in Miami/West Palm Beach the last week and I bought myself a ZuneHD. So now that I have it, I am hot on making something for it... I don't know what, but I definetely will make anything.
I was checking the boards here and then and it really looks like there are almost NO new games made by the developers here... how comes that? Where are all the excited guys that announced working on something?
I'm late to the party (just got the game a few days ago) but I must say I absolutely love Vangard's Fate. I would never have guessed an RPG could play so well with such a limited device, and the fact that the art is simply fantastic as well totally blew me away!
A suggestion regarding memory usage: is it practical to implement a paging system of sorts? I'm guessing that the Zune's OS doesn't do paging (I'd assume WinCE is capable of it, but perhaps it's disabled on Zunes) but from what I've read you've got gobs of disk space available but severely limited RAM, which sounds like an ideal time to use paging. Without actual access to the memory addresses (I assume XNA doesn't allow C#'s unsafe code, although I haven't tried) OS-style paging probably isn't practical, but you could still write stuff out to storage when not needed.
I assume things like the menu screen are already unloaded from RAM when not required, but you could do the same with the pause menu (if you haven't already). It might also be possible to do this with things like inventory (certainly the graphics for it) and things like graphics and data for any unit that doesn't spawn on the current level. Taking it really far, you could unload all but the most basic data for terrain squares and monsters that you can't see on-screen (even if on your level). Preserve enough info that they can move/spawn/etc. but unload their graphics when not required.
It involves more storage accesses, which are slower and slightly increase battery drain, but it might be worthwhile to save RAM and let you fit more awesomeness into this game.
In any case, thanks so much for all your hard work on this, and I can't wait to see the next release! This game is incredible and going by your screenshots and such, is only becoming more-so. I'm sure you're busy as the holidays approach once again, but if you get the chance, a new Valgard's Fate preview would totally make my day (or week, or month).
