How do I figure out what I need to fix in order to successfully load up my game on Xbox consoles?

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  • How do I figure out what I need to fix in order to successfully load up my game on Xbox consoles? When it fails to load, the blue loading bar will turn red, and the loading will freeze, or give up, permanently. Is there a known cause or fix for this, or, if not, is there a way to test or debug the exact cause? Such as through Visual Studio or some sort of test environment, with a log that will reveal the exact issue at the exact moment that the loading bar turns red, so that I know what I need to work on?

    *UPDATE: Check my last post in this thread to see my update, if you too are struggling to get a game to load up on Xbox consoles.

  • As ever the first thing to check is the browser console and see if any errors are logged there. I'm not sure how to check the browser console on Xbox - Microsoft might have some documentation on how to remotely debug it.

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  • As ever the first thing to check is the browser console and see if any errors are logged there. I'm not sure how to check the browser console on Xbox - Microsoft might have some documentation on how to remotely debug it.

    Thank you for your reply. I'm currently working hard on this. I'd appreciate if anyone else reading this who also uses Construct to make Xbox games can help with the solution.

    I have my Xbox One console in developer mode, and my Xbox Device Portal open in a browser on my nearby computer, as well as my project solution open in Visual Studio, with the Target version and Min version both set to 10.0.14393.0, Platform set to x64, and remote machine name set to XBOXONE. When I run the Visual Studio Debug x64 on Local Machine (computer), it runs correctly, but when I try to run it on Remote Machine (Xbox), to try to get any hint on what causes the freeze/red loading bar, the deploy fails. If it matters, the error list gives me the Warning:

    MSB3842 Project depends upon SDK "Visual C++ 2015 Runtime for Universal Windows Platform Apps v14.0" which supports apps targeting "UAP 10.0". To verify whether "Visual C++ 2015 Runtime for Universal Windows Platform Apps v14.0" is compatible with "UAP 10.0.14393.0", contact the SDK author or see go.microsoft.com/fwlink C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\Preview\Community\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets

    That's just a Warning as opposed to an Error, if that matters. I'm not sure Visual Studio is really telling me why the deploy is failing, just 'Deploy failed'. I'd appreciate if anyone could give me a way around this so that I can run the game on my Xbox One console and see if it gives me any errors when it freezes. In the past, I thought it was for some reason necessary to Require Authentication, with Universal (Unencrypted Protocol), but I notice Visual Studio never gets to a point where it asks for a username and password even if I set that.

    Alternatively, there's the Xbox Device Portal, which is on my computer browser at https://###.###.#.###:#####/#Home. I added my game's Test package there and launched it, which remotely starts the app on my Xbox One console. The blue loading bar eventually turns red and freezes there. However, I can't seem to find any place or method in the Xbox Device Portal that gives me any information, such as a console, output log, or error list. There's even an area called 'Crash data', where it says 'Ensure the title VM is terminated in order to see ERA crash dumps'. I can see my game's title listed there, along with the package name, and a box under 'Crash dumps' that I can checkmark, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything there--no data or dump--even after multiple attempts at running the game. It does eventually give me a popup saying: "Something went wrong. Message: Unknown error. Close". For all I know, it doesn't produce anything because it never really 'crashes', as it never gets past the loading bar, and just freezes until I turn the Xbox console off using the button on it.

    I'm guessing Visual Studio would be more informative than the Xbox Device Portal, if I can just get VS to Deploy the game on my Xbox One console.

    I also just now played around with Construct3 (the yearly price scares me away from using it, vs that Construct2 does everything I need), and I imported my project into it, in order to check out the Export options. I see that it has split Windows UWP apps into 2 options--Windows Store (UWP) and Xbox One (UWP)--vs Co2's single Windows Store option. (I also see it says 'Deprecated' above it, which is a bit strange, as I focus on consoles, and Xbox is the precious only choice Construct is able to do.) I wanted to see what it says for the VS version, in case that's related to helping my game run on Xbox. The free version doesn't let me get that far, it seems. The latest Construct2 uses VS2015, and I use 'Visual Studio 2017 Preview'.

    Lastly, the Windows App Certification Kit test always tells me that one aspect of the test has failed:

    App manifest resources tests FAILED App resources Error Found: The app resources validation test detected the following errors: The test was blocked from execution. Please try re-running the validation. If the test execution remains blocked then please contact support. Impact if not fixed: The app might not install if the strings or images declared in your app’s manifest are incorrect. If the app does install with these errors, your app’s logo or other images used by your app might not display correctly. How to fix: Fix the problem indicated by the error message. See the link below for more information: AppX Resource Validation learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/debug-test-perf/windows-app-certification-kit-tests

    I gave a ton of information just to ensure I covered everything. I hope it doesn't scare off any help. I hope someone can help with any part of it, to get me closer to my goal of debugging the frozen red loading bar on Xbox One.

  • I was finally able to make one of my Construct2 games run on Xbox, so I’m sharing here what anyone else can do if they have the same issue of the red/frozen loading bar on Xbox console: The short answer is that you have to make the game small enough in size––usually a combination of image quality and audio quality/length. In addition to helping others, I typed all this up to help my future self remember it all.

    (I likely don’t have to go over the stuff you might already know from past Construct2 Xbox tutorials, but here’s a quick rundown anyway: Always use a fresh new export folder out of Construct2 instead of overwriting an old one if you want to ensure no issues with any Xbox Live-related stuff, open the [Game Name].sln file in Visual Studio Community 2017 Preview Version 15.8.0 Preview 2.0, double-click package.appxmanifest in the list at the right, right-click on the project name at the right by the icon of the orange square that says 'JS', go to 'Properties', paste 10.0.14393.0 in both target and min version, right-click on project name and click Manage NuGet Packages, then browse 'xbox live', and you want the first one with many downloads, the WinRT.UWP one, install it, accept the license accept window, and wait until iit says ===Finished=== in the bottom Output window, then in Visual Assets back in that package.appxmanifest, I like to insert #000000 in both fields of the visual assets display settings tile background and splash screen background to give the loading a nice black background, then Generate a 400x400 logo of your game with a nice alpha background, wait until it Generates it for all images there, you may sometimes have to handle the LargeTile1240x1240 separately,

    which is always almost entirely alpha with just a tiny ~300x300image of your game’s logo that needs to fits the strict 200,000byte limit, open jquery-3.4.1.min.js from the file list at right and re-save as with Encoding, the one at the top, the ‘Unicode (UTF-8 with signature)’ one, and do the same with any css font files you used in the project if any, but can likely delete any font html files if any are there, likely not needed, otherwise do the same with them, they all need the UTF-8 encoding (but can then import those resaved files into the Construct2 project itself to save you from repeating this step until/unless you add any new web fonts after that point), then do the Store Association step, (if you’re signed into your Microsoft account but still get a network error, you may have to wait 1-5 days for Microsoft to figure out there’s an issue and fix it, nothing you can do about it on your end) and finally say Create App Packages, as only x64, nothing else.)

    You can test the game using the Xbox Device Portal to ensure you made it small enough to run (no frozen red loading bar) on Xbox consoles by using the Dev Mode app on your Xbox console to put it into Dev Mode and using a browser on your computer to go to the url the console provides (something like https://###.###.#.###:#####/#Network) and uploading your test package that way and running it on console.

    Finally, here's the good stuff:

    Some great advice on how to make your game small enough: This won’t work on big epic games with tons of audio and big Spriter spritesheets, like my one Xbox game that won’t run on consoles even after doing everything mentioned here, (even though it can be found in the Xbox store, no choice but to just let players know it only runs on Windows computer devices regardless) but it will work on more modest-sized games, like it did on my one recent game whose image folder ended up being just 67mb, and whose audio/media folder ended up at 162mb. First off, how to minimize images: use the option in Construct2/3 to set all images in the entire project to jpg’s with only 25 quality, which is actually surprisingly good-looking. Then manually turn every image in your project that uses any alpha at all into png-8’s, which may take a while and you’ll likely miss some your first try but can catch those later in testing. You can likewise start by turning all images in project into png8’s instead of jpg25’s if you have more alpha images than flat ones, then manually turn all flat ones into jpg25’s. Note that jpg’s never result in spritesheets, so you may notice thousands of more images in your exported image folder, but jpg’s are so much smaller than even png'8's that it's worth it if not necesary.

    As for audio, use an audio-editing program such as Adobe Audition to turn all audio in your project into the minimum quality, such as by Batch Processing them all into 6000 Hz, Mono, 8-bit. Then import those wav’s back into Construct2. A good trick if you just want to turn all audio into your project into minimum quality is to put all your m4a/mpeg-4 audio files from your project’s Files folder into Adobe Audition, and Batch Process them all into the Export Setting’s new Sample Type of 6000 Hz, Mono, 8-bit wav’s. Note that ogg files aren’t needed for Xbox, just the m4a’s. Then put all those new wav’s back into Construct2 with minimum quality, and voilà. Feel free to keep any important shorter audio files as full-quality, as you’re afforded some quality on Xbox. And as always, always use an online backup service for all Construct2 (or Spriter) related files, such as Dropbox, or, better yet, one of the cheap life-long solutions out there like pCloud that cost only $100-200 for life.

    In conclusion, as long as you use methods like those described above to decrease the total size of your game package, it’ll load up on Xbox consoles before it has a chance to give up. If there’s a way to get even huge games to load up on Xbox, I don’t know of it. The trick seems to be to just stick to jpg25’s, png-8’s, and low-Hz/mono/8-bit audios. The result is not too bad other than the butchered audio that also seems to decrease its volume, which you can make up for by setting it higher in-game. Keep important audio’s higher quality, such as any speech that needs to be heard.

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