Well, it's still dopey programmer art but at least I'm not looking at a flat grey-blue wash. I made this thing 4000 pixels long so once I have the scrolling code the art will be ready to go. Unfortunately, I ran into a kind of technical snag that I haven't encountered before: XNA is telling me that it's having assembly problems, and that some of my stuff was originally built with a different version of XNA than other stuff. It offers to fix it for me by altering an "app.config" file, but if I take it up on the offer the game throws an exception while loading the wizard's texture and won't start.
This is frankly the kind of baffling, scary, dot-net hokery pokery bullshit that I hoped to avoid. It really is true that if you are even dabbling in game development you'll eventually have to figure out just about everything related to your tools, but I dread trawling through msdn pages trying to parse out the nature of a Visual Studio compiler error. One minute you're sailing along making wizards jump over pine trees, and the next you're elbows deep in the dirt. So it goes.
I have been shuffling the build between work and home computers using ftp, could there be a difference between the two versions of Visual C# 2008 I have installed on each machine? If there was such a significant difference, why would it suddenly rear its head? I tried removing my most recent class, which controls the background, to no avail.
Here we have, for the first time, an entirely persuasive argument for version control, even at the toddler-dev level. Since I'm absolutely certain that this bug was not always there, when I get home tonight I can just step back through my version tree until I find a build that doesn't have the bug, then look at the changelog and I should have my answer. Easy, right? Like so many other things, before I try it, it couldn't look easier. . .
EDIT: I had a bit more downtime this afternoon and did some search engine sleuthing . . . I still don't know exactly what the hell happened here, but it turns out if I go to Project > Upgrade it rebuilds the solution and the error goes away. Best guess: When I was creating the background class, I fat-fingered it and created an XNA 3.0 class instead of a 3.1, because 3.0 is still an option in the menu and it's conceivable I could have done that. Why just deleting that class didn't fix the problem I don't know, it must have done something to the compiler that could only be resolved with an "upgrade". Windows! Yeah!
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