Xbox 360 Defense Grid issues

[jeffpobst]

Hi folks,

If you have Defense Grid on the Xbox 360, it doesn't matter if you have the DLC or not, you may or may not have problems. It is our belief that those problems are not caused by the game code itself, but by a mismatch between the game and the data centers that store achievement information. We've contacted Microsoft, but due to the holiday break we haven't heard back from them yet.

Here is what we know. When we released the title update for Defense Grid on December 1st so that you could play the You Monster expansion, the achievement list changed (there is only one list and you have to update it each time you add achievements - that is their system).

Unfortunately, we now know that at the time the game was launched, there was an error and incorrect achievement information was posted to many data centers (I'm now guessing it is many and not all). This caused a lot of problems for some people, and some people were getting freezes and error messages whenever the game checked for achievements. Because of this we talked with Microsoft and they told us we'd need to do a Title Update (which went out on December 22nd) which translated the original achievement IDs into the new IDs that were now on these data centers.

For some people, this title update stopped all their problems and we were successful. Unfortunately though, for some people, this created problems where they didn't exist before and freezing and achievement pop ups started happening even more rapidly and more problems were caused.

I now believe that this is because all the data centers don't have the same data. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do at Hidden Path other than request Microsoft to look into it and make sure that all the data centers have the same thing which they had us make the title update for.

There are a couple of problems that you can possibly run into that aren't related to the achievement mismatch issue.

The first is an issue we don't know exactly how it is happening, but we know it is related to the recent dashboard update. Sometimes for some people, typically people with a slim xbox 360, can get into the game before it is done loading all the content. We can't reproduce this in our test environment, so it appears it is something different in the production environment that we can't investigate. When this happens you may see placeholder strings in the mission selection screen that look like $cam_youmonster or other programming text with $'s. If you see this, back out to the "press start" screen and wait another 10 seconds or so - don't keep playing, as you'll try to play without all the game content and things will go bad and crash. After going back to the press start screen and waiting, then press start and see if all the text looks right once again. Once the text looks fine - it is done loading all the content, and you should have a fine game experience going forward.

The second issue some people are having is also one we didn't see in testing repeatedly which is that some people (also typically on an slim Xbox 360 console) with the DLC are freezing in the Portal II or Surprise Party SuperGrinder missions. What is likely happening there is that they are running out of memory. We pulled Grinder for Xbox 360 on those maps because we saw them run out of memory on the Xbox 360 during testing, but we successfully completed SuperGrinder many times. We do know though that those maps are close in memory, and depending on the number of towers one is using and whether or not you are using fast forward (fast forward takes more memory), we are getting reports that some customers are running out of memory and freezing up on those levels. Had we known this would happen we wouldn't have shipped those levels. There has been an outcry for more grinder and supergrinder and we wanted to give people what we could, but obviously we want it to work (and it did work many times in testing, but something appears to be different there for some people).

That's what we know at this time.

The main thing that needs to be fixed is the data centers all need to have the right information that is the same - there's no way we can title update for some people so we need Microsoft to address this.

Because we can't reproduce the loading issue we can't address that one, so please use the workaround if you run into corrupted test.

The only thing we could do to help on the supergrinder maps if yours freezes would be to remove it. Not much of a solution, but we can't create new memory on your box.

That's what we know today. Hopefully we'll learn more as we hear back from Microsoft.

Jeff

[Baby Fark McGee-zax]

I have constantly had freezing issues since the 12-22 update. I have also had a constant stream of "unable to award..." messages for months and months. I thought those sucked, but now the freezing is most troublesome. I reside in a small town called Magna, Utah. Just outside of Salt Lake City. Playing on a black Xbox 360 Elite with a 120 GB HDD. Hope MS can help in this issue by checking my local datacenter .

Aside from that, I'd like to thank Hidden Path for the game, the download content, and the dedication to support this title post release. I know you guys are doing you're best and look forward to future titles you release.