Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Lets set some things clear

1 - Project is not a hoax. TeamFSD is alive and well, and FSD 2.0 exist, just have a look at svn log...
2 - Life is sometime a bitch, i'm pretty much out of free time these, cause I do have a full time job, a wife, a dog and a house to take care of! When I have 1 or 2 hours free i do need to get some sun!
Can you imagine how much time it takes to keep up with every change that happen in the project, analyse, develop and post every change here? Even thought I do not post a lot these days and dont contribute a lot in the svn, I'm still in almost every design discussion and help other coders with whatever they are working on.
3 - I expected to take last weekend to work a lot on FSD but my main server hard drive crashed and lost a full tb of data, some of my personnal data and some of work related data, and need I need to catch on what i lost!
4 - Building a stable alpha version is taking a bit more job than I first expected but the wait will be worth it! And from the SVN log I guess you can clearly see that work is going on. Last time I fully tested every was pretty much working great, except that there was some trouble with the XBLA game list and there was some cpu issue when scrolling the game list, but were almost there.
5 - here's my personnal take on jigga99's melodrama :
Lol this could be splitted on multiple points, but just a direct message to him :
If you want to release it, why arent you doing it?
And why arent you contributing you code fix with us if you think you did better than us? TeamFSD is pretty easy to reach.
Here's a bit of FSD history for those who could be interested :
axc97c started the project as a lone coder,
released v1.0 up to v1.09 with souce code bundled with files, annonced with l.09 that he dont have any more free time to work on project.
JQE took over the project, gathered some coders on irc and forums. TeamFSD was created!
TeamFSD then put FSD 1.09 source on Google Code (http://code.google.com/p/freestyledash/source/list?num=25&start=15, Created on March 2nd, by Workerbe, which is JQE) FSD 1.09 was released in febuary. Therefore you can see that TeamFSD did put the project on Google Code, not original creator.
We then released 1.10.
When building we received shit load of stupid flaming comments about the source not building on certain revision. Project was really active, some guys were making daily build, posting them all around and claiming credits for it. We were coping with this.
The whole 1.x source was some really spaghetti, still a great job for a lone coder, but almost lucky some part worked properly. We started to a major rewrite for 2.0 so it comply to standard development patterns and get a clean way for skinners to do almost whatever they want.
To ensured we did a good job, we pretty much started from scratch. On current svn (google code) there was lots of flamers sending hate mail when a single revision had a trouble, just thinking about the whole source being pretty much destroyed , we though it was a better idea to close the door a bit until we can get 2.0 out.
2.0 required a lot of research for some features that were still untested (http downloading,  fan speed management, led management), and we didnt wanted this untested code to go widespread as this could possibly cause damage to an xbox (i did screwed up 2 board of lights while testing).
Plans has always been to package source with every release and we never said we wont go back to a public svn!

So lets start with some of jigga99's explaination :

nope, I have absolutely nothing to do with teamfsd,
Indeed
I have last weeks source. like i said,
This post was made today, therefore he would have  source from > june 20th.
from what i see from thier ’secret’ source theyre working so hard on, its fulll of bugs and garbage code that barely works.
 Well if you think design patterns are garbage then I can see how much of a great coder you are!
i’ll give it one plus, it looks damn good visually, but functionality is a few steps back from 1.20
In which point is it a step back? 
Lets recap most of 1.20 features :
          -List games based on folder, manually entered for each category
          -FTP Server
          -NTP Client
          -Use PC software to download cover art and stuff
Thats pretty much it for the "Big" features.
Lets compare to actual status of 2.0 :
          -List games based on generic folder then autodetect type of the content, so you can just dump pretty much any folder.
         -FTP Server
         -NTP Client
         -Download cover art and stuff from HTTP without using PC software.
         -Extract game information from xex without having to download for non connected xbox.
         -RSS Client
         -Skin fully customisable
Where's the few steps back?
“why not to submit your fixes to the official project?”
there is no ‘official’ project in case u havnt noticed. what about this ‘team’ or this ‘project’ seems so ‘official’? its an open source project now all of a sudden closed source, and if you *think* they’ll be making it open source again, youre crazy….trust me.
Haha so you got super secret contact that know whats in every one's mind? Dont worry you'll all get official 2.0 source at the same time as the official 2.0 release. 
im just giving back what belongs to the people. think of me as robin hood with a computer
So i guess you are wearing thights while stealing some code? :P


Let me take the jigga99's post that is the most interesting :
dont worry guys, VERY SOON you will have a release, we changed things up a bit
working on my own stuff, these guys took free code and got selfish, but I’ll be fixing that verrry soon with our own custom release.
So trying to release a software as stable as possible is selfish? 
theres tons of bugs (thats the type of stuff that happens when u have a couple kids testing their own code behind closed doors…)
So you can make a whole dashboard without having any bugs WHILE STILL IN PRE-ALPHA STAGE?
but most of which will be worked out in a few days, and I’ll be releasing a working FSD by this upcoming sunday, along with source.
Great can't wait to see this! If you did fixed most of the issue that congrats, we'll integrate it and release a proper FSD 2.0!  
what we’ve done:
- dvd copy fixed and complete
 My last post was about dvd copy that might not make it into alpha release, I did pointed that the mecanism is there. Only the skin was missing. No fix was required as this was already working 100% using our debug commands mecanism. So unless he either did the skin for the module (which can be painfull if you dont fully understand whats going on and how we wanted to have this implemented)  or he redid the whole mecanism or simply used 1.20 code which was buggy as hell.
- avatars glitches fixed
LoL so what was those glitches?
- removed ’save game viewer’ crap
Some save game viewing feature were added in svn on june 27th, there was no trace of that before, so if is code is from last week, then he doesnt have this 
- faster/better FTP (faster and better than what theyre probably going to release)
 There's some usb writing issue that slow down ftp transfer, writing to the drive slowly dies on large file. Cant wait to see how he can have rewritten the xbox usb drivers. I might be totally wrong about this, but my conclusion comes from days of experimentation. If theres a way around the current issues, i'm pretty much hyped to see how they are fixed!
- fixed some graphic glitches
 Only graphical glitche there is, is some buffering issue with the image, but were pretty much fixed now, I dont think its what he's talking about.
Im gonna try and revert some of the crap these guys put on here. as of right now it looks all pretty and flashy, but ur literally better off with 1.20 (which is why im removing/fixing all these issues before i release) im gonna try my best to give the people what they want (based on viewing comments and such from everyone) and then just release the source from there.
already got an svn partially set up so this project can go back to the people! keep an eye on xbox-scene news, you’ll be seeing some updates soon
Cant wait till he release this hacked FSD 2.0!


Personnally i dont think he's real and I wouldnt get my hopes up for his planned next sunday release. If he do, I cant wait to see what changes he made. Which version was it built of.


I'm off now, i'm gonna test latest build on my retail xbox to see if were almost done nailing the minor issues that are left.









Saturday, June 19, 2010

FSD 2.0 19-06-10

Currently testing latest fsd build on my gaming xbox.
Seems like xex parsing stopped working properly. Anthony started cleaning up the xex code so we can add delta compressed xex support (xex recreated using 360 game hack tool) and it should also be using the internal fonction of the kernel to decompress the xex, instead of the function i wrote. But as I said, doesnt seems to be running fine.

HTTP indexing seems to works fine and stable. Didnt crashed while indexing my >300 games library + >300 xbla games. (Might be talking too fast as its still indexing but fill pretty confident its working fine).

Copy DVD is still not completed (a fixed core library is completed, only the gui is left) should this be in alpha or should it be left for later release?

Still didnt had time to code a lot, but it seems like my first post this week gave the whole team a little boost.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Today's build

*I'm trying to get back to daily update about whats going on... i'll do my best so you guys know what to expect for next public build.

Its been a while since I last compiled FSD 2 and dont know every details about whats has changed and what are the plans on some module.

As the first loading screen is gone (it load straight to dash while loading stuff in background), if you opened the game list you would get an incomplete list. Without our debugger tool, there was no way to tell if content parsing is done, so I added a note in the status bar to say that content parsing is underway.

Also added ftp status to the status bar, it currently just tell if theres an ftp connection open. Speed would be nice, but should be done after alpha release.

At each restart of FSD I had some tab appering as blue without a logo, I dont know whats is the current tab manager/editor status, i thought it was already worked fine... Need to talk to MaesterRowen about this, might be just a minor bug. Disabled it for now.
*Update : this is a random bug, i'll fix it later today.

Seems like the gamelist doesnt reflect the selected game info anymore. I know there was some work done to split our game list module (ScnQuickGameView, which is responsible for displaying anything related to game : the dvd tab is an scnquickgameview, the favorite tab are scnquickgameview, and the gamelist is an scnquickgameview... It was just a mode setting in the skin xml that defined how it displayed games.)

The gamelist code now seems to all be in CGamesList with the OnNotifySelChanged code commented out...
If theres too much work left to get this working properly, i'll roll back scnquickgameview to a previous version.
*Update : Changing selected games with banner + screenshot + game icon + background was too slow. Code was disabled until preloading is completed.

Also, read some comments on forums and here some answers :
Media Player :
I dont know the current status, will have a look at it later. But this is not an mplayer port!! Its mostly a xmedia GUI. Therefore, dont expect mkv playing and samba support!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

I'm still alive!

So sorry for lack of recent updates... As with every other members of team fsd, we've been busy as hell with our day life...

FSD 2.0 project is still alive even thought its been a while since it has not been updated. I'm currently starting cleanup work to get a fonctionnal version out.

I think this lack of updates was also due to some lack of communication between the team... Some weeks ago we were really near of an alpha release, like 2-3 days. Only some minor gui works was left to be done. Then we all started doing some need things we thought well be usefull and the whole thing started crumbling and seems like nobody wanted to take the time to fix it.

In the next few days, i'll try to get a clean, fully working build that you all can use.
This build will probably have every extra features off or non-fully fonctionnal but it will list games in a neat way and run them properly.

Regards,
HellDoc