XNA HiDef you Don’t Want

I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh.  Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.

Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before.  Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.

Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:

 

Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.

I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.

Comments

[Simon (Darkside) Jackson]

There is another option to assist development on machines that have a good graphics card but dont meet the full requirements for High Def (you could build the same in XNA3)
There is a library called FbDeprofiler that you can add to your game to bypass the hidef check while you are developing
http://fatbat.co.uk/site/post/HiDef-and-Reach-profiles-Reverse-Engineering-and-Reflection.aspx

Wouldn't recommend deploying a game with this enabled but it's big assist to devs especially when you are trying to work on your xbox game on your laptop.

[Luke Avery]

Hi rob i have your book and i am currently programming games in xna for my computer games course at huddersfeild uni first year. I was wanting to know if i could post a link from my blog to yours please simply because i am keeping track of my progress and i thought posting a link to your website would help other readers by going to your website.

Cheers

[Rob]

Hi. Thanks for asking. Of course you can link through.

[Abery]

Hello.
Is there any possibility that you can send my this fbProfiler.dll file to panabery@gmail.com ?
This page: http://fatbat.co.uk/site/post/HiDef-and-Reach-profiles-Reverse-Engineering-and-Reflection.aspx is inactive...

[BamYazi]

The fbDeprofiler link works again now (or at least it will redirect you to the dll).