Do you really got a message telling you upload only works with IE?
I uploaded using Firefox as usual and everything was cool.
I think you just got in the deadline and no further upload was accepted.

I cannot answer for someone else for certain, but maybe it's the automated response from emailing admin @ Dream Build Play:

from: XNA Dream Build Play
to: Matthew Doucette
date: Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:19 AM
subject: Out of Office AutoReply:

Thank you for your email. Our office hours are Monday - Friday 8 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. US CT. The submission deadline is August 6, 2009, at 11:59:59 PM CT (US Central Time). If you are experiencing difficulties with uploading your .zip file, please be patient and try again. You may want to try using IE7 as your internet browser.

Bolded by me.

 

I hit similar issues uploading last night. Was using firefox, got a message a few times that it didn't like my zip file, and as the midnight CT approached, it uploaded for a long time and then kicked me back to the main dreambuildplay.com website, with the links to submit removed :(

I hope they do allow an extra day or two for submissions. Its obviously my fault to have cut it so close, but would be nice to still be able to get the game in, not like its going to give an advantage to anyone.

David Markham:

I hope they do allow an extra day or two for submissions. Its obviously my fault to have cut it so close, but would be nice to still be able to get the game in, not like its going to give an advantage to anyone.

I agree.  We are submitting games, not 3-hour exams, so an extension will not harm anyone.  We still got our game in (I think), but it would be nice to make sure, and it would be nice to get to last-minute debug our game on the Xbox which we were unable to do.

I just got a reply from a Dream Build Play support member, saying they would investigate my issue closer.  I'm not sure if that means getting back to me about if my submission went through, or if they'd consider a deadline extension.  I'll keep you posted.

I got the same error last night too (telling me my .zip wasn't a .zip) after attempting to upload for about an hour i was booted back to the main page. I was using google chrome which seems like the problem after reading through this thread. Anyway I DID get a 4 month premium code in addition to the 12 month but I'm still awaiting a reply from DBP support as to the official status of my submission.

Matthew Doucette:

David Markham:

I hope they do allow an extra day or two for submissions. Its obviously my fault to have cut it so close, but would be nice to still be able to get the game in, not like its going to give an advantage to anyone.

I agree.  We are submitting games, not 3-hour exams, so an extension will not harm anyone.  We still got our game in (I think), but it would be nice to make sure, and it would be nice to get to last-minute debug our game on the Xbox which we were unable to do.

I agree.

We had similar errors with our submission, using firefox we were booted out to the main page and I don't think we were able to submit the .zip.  I sent an email in to the admin with no response so far but I'm banking on an extension.

Our trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ps5aSXravg

We worked a lot on this I'm hoping we get a chance to submit our game.

Jim Perry:

opt2not:

one...your service for xbox live updates seems to have interrupted our creators club access, therefore last minute bug fixes weren't going in.

You do realize these are two different teams, right? The XNA GS Team has nothing to do with Live updates.

Of course. But you would think that a company running multiple teams that rely on the stability of their network access, should be talking to avoid scheduling conflicts.

ok... looks like they mix the threads... =)
my posts without quotes have no sense now =P

OverMatrix:

In the official rules it was written that "all times in these Rules are stated in 'Central Time', which is Greenwich Mean Time minus six (6) hours", but the contest used the "- five (5) hours" rule of daylight saving instead.

I'm brazilian and I was damaged because my project didn't get into the contest. The problem is agravated by the fact that the software of the site kept telling me my zip was not a zip, and only later it was explained that it only worked with Internet Explorer.

But my main issue was the rules clearly stating that the contest was using GMT -6 (so I keept following an online GMT clock) only to discover that because I'm brazilian and I was not aware of daylight saving I wasn't going to be able to submit the game I worked months on...

Does someone in the forums, some Microsoft employee, can give me an answer if that error in the rules is going to be held in consideration? I mean, they ARE the OFFICIAL rules...

I also was not aware of their day light time savings...
And yes, the rules says explicitly GMT - 6

But , anyway, show us your game =)

take a look in mine: ;)
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrRodrigoCard

A few points:

1. We didn't submit our game early.  We've been working on it for a year and we could have, but there's always something more you can add.  (We didn't know you could submit it, and then re-submit it later.)  We should have submitted it early expecting problems outside of our control.  But, waiting until the night of the deadline to submit is not a crime.  In any other contest, you're allowed to wait until the deadline.  As long as toolset and submission site works, it's fine.
2. We are forced to use Game Studio 3.1.  It's new.  It's buggy.  It deleted ALL OF MY PROJECT'S CONTENT during submission.  This bug occurred because some process was using DirectX at the time (the only app running was Firefox 3.5 rendering the submission video and the DBP website).  VC# + GS3.1 doesn't like other programs using DirectX at the same time, and a but deleted all of my files on compile failure.  We are the guinea pigs for the tools, and it crippled our submission because we were submitting it.  :/  How ironic.
3. Xbox LIVE was down for 24 hours (on/off, but who can guess when?) before the contest ended.  I couldn't beta test the new code I added, which works perfectly on the PC.  I haven't had a game crashing bug in my game for a year.  But now I do, on the Xbox version -- because I couldn't test it.  If I had known, I would have just removed the code prior to submission.  <sigh>
4. I still don't even know if our submission got through, because I was using Firefox.  It's not in the gallery yet.

So, please give us a break.
An extension is not going to give anyone an unfair advantage.
It would just make all of these problems disappear.

At some time I posted that we used Firefox and our submission appeared to work, but I'd like to recall that statement.  Because our submission actually ended after the deadline, and dreambuildplay.com site was modified immediately upon the deadline to deny access to our accounts, the "success or failure" screen never showed up.  So we have no idea if our submission worked.  And we very well may have suffered from the "Firefox bug" as others did.

We did watch our network traffic (upload) via task manager and it lasted for about 30 minutes, and we calculated that our upload would take about 25 minutes (roughly, as the traffic speed was up and down all over the place), so it appears the full file was sent.

Our submission may have been rejected due to this "Firefox bug", or due to the uploaded taking beyond the deadline's time limit.  (As you know, we do have a pretty good excuse as to why we over stepped the time limitation.)

It's looking like Duality ZF did not make Dream Build Play.  We have yet to be listed in the gallery.  And the Dream Build Play support member has not responded back to me on whether or not our submission worked or failed, or whether we are allowed to resubmit.  I hope we can resubmit.  I don't think anyone here competiting against us would have a problem with it.

Matthew Doucette:

At some time I posted that we used Firefox and our submission appeared to work, but I'd like to recall that statement.  Because our submission actually ended after the deadline, and dreambuildplay.com site was modified immediately upon the deadline to deny access to our accounts, the "success or failure" screen never showed up.  So we have no idea if our submission worked.  And we very well may have suffered from the "Firefox bug" as others did.

We did watch our network traffic (upload) via task manager and it lasted for about 30 minutes, and we calculated that our upload would take about 25 minutes (roughly, as the traffic speed was up and down all over the place), so it appears the full file was sent.

Our submission may have been rejected due to this "Firefox bug", or due to the uploaded taking beyond the deadline's time limit.  (As you know, we do have a pretty good excuse as to why we over stepped the time limitation.)

One thing to note, if I remember correctly, is after you submit all your files, you actually have to also hit a "submit entry" button. Which means that even if your files uploaded, it's not necessarily that they were submitted as an entry if you were blocked out before you could hit that button.

My main problem is, as much as I love you guys and the work you do... I'm not one for excuses. The DBP site being broken, or XBox Live being down, or even the daylight savings issue I can understand to an extent, but a build breaking for an individual doesn't hold as much mustard. That's the expectantly unexpected factor in software development, and they can't make exceptions for everyone who had a snag in their plans near the deadline wire. I know you may not have done this, but what you SHOULD have done was before making last-minute changes, made sure you had a build that you were willing to send in, no changes made all zipped up as your entry in case the changes you were making broke something. Yes I know it's the compiler's fault, but that's a lesson. Never trust compilers. I've seen compilers break in the past on perfectly valid code. And even never trust yourself. There were a few things I wanted to add to my submission that I felt I could have snuck in with the time I had left, but it wasn't worth the threat as they'd have to be tested heavily afterwards. I sympathize and I know these kinds of things make me CRINGE and I'm really sad for you guys, but if the compiler had been the only issue that's the result of preparation of an individual team, and I'd be skeptical about allowing those kinds of exceptions. That said, the compiler is one piece of the broken system, so things do get dicey when we look on a more global scale.

The biggest problem to me is the Firefox issue. I expect slow servers when dealing with deadlines, but the only reason I used IE was because I saw on the msg boards people saying firefox didn't work, and I don't think entrants should have to sift through a message board to deal with a nasty bug that you'd only see on your final steps of submission, and may not be able to figure out the "why" of it. The submission process not being tested under at least Firefox is a bad thing.

It looks like our submission didn't make it through, since when the upload finished, it just reloaded the main DBP page with all access to accounts missing.  There was no "submit" button to press.  But they do have our submission sitting on their servers.  So, we'll see!

I had a bunch of problems trying to submit my game. I tried first with firefox and the connection kept on getting reset before the upload finished. Then I tried IE just in case that was the problem. Same problem, my connection got reset all the time. It would have been nice to have some kind of progress bar which indicates how far along the upload process you are. It just kind of keeps you hanging wondering if it is actually uploading or not.

Anyway, I tried the next day to upload from work. Then I started getting the dreaded invalid .zip file error. I tried zipping the file with different zip programs (the inbuilt Vista zipper and 7zip). Still no luck, tried zipping some dummy files so the upload was quick. Still no luck, then finally I tried Internet Explorer and that worked. Phew.. Luckily I started submitting 2 days before the deadline or I would have missed it as well. I worked too long and hard on this game to miss the deadline because of some dumb reason like that.

Hi all here who had problems with their last-minute submissions,

I don't want to belittle all the problems you had and the anguish it caused you, but wanted to give you some advice should you decide to enter DBP next year again, about a fact that you may not be aware of:

When you submit your game to DBP, then this does not mean that the moment you submit it you are done. That's it. Case closed. No - it's not! It's not like when you hand your exam paper to the professor and then you realize that you forgot something, only you can't get your papers back to add it. With DBP you can get your papers back (metaphorically speaking), at least if it's still before the submission deadline:

After you have  submitted your entry, you then have an "Unsubmit" option. If you select this option, your submission is revoked, but you can then simply submit it again, with different content!

I think I did this three our four times: Submitted one version, then found something I wanted to change, so I unsubmitted and submitted a second version, then again, etc.

So think about it: If you have a deadline, how many things can go wrong? Your computer could break down one day before submission end. There could be a power outage in your neighborhood on the last day. Your internet provider could have an outage just on that day. Or maybe the DBP site is overloaded by so many developers submitting their entry in the last minute.

So it is just standard risk management to not submit your entry on the last day. Which however doesn't mean that you can't still work on your entry until the last minute. Because as said above, there is an "undo-function": About a week before the deadline, submit a first version of your game, even if it's not 100% complete. Then a few days later, once you have a better version, unsubmit the previous one and submit the better version. Rinse and repeat until just before the doors close. Only this time, if you should have any problems during the last minute submit, then at least you will have successfully submitted the second-to-last version of your game. It may not be as perfect as the last-minute-version, but at least it was successfully submitted!

Again, I don't mean this in a condescending way, but as honest advice for next time, since you might simply not have known about this option of unsubmitting/re-submitting (under the assumption that it will work the same next year).

Doc

As someone who's game DID get in, I still found it frustrating that although they had a way to resubmit, you didn't even know that option existed until you did your first submission. It's that little piece of information that makes people push closer to the deadline, because we don't KNOW if we can resubmit.

I appreciate the posts, Stegersaurus Games and Spyn Doctor.  I don't like excuses, either.  One thing for sure is we are risk takers.  We should have built an early version of the game and submitted it as a fall back measure.  But, we just want our game included.  And last year the extension was given due to the DBP site being down.  Technically, I guess the site was "down" for some Firefox users, us included, but we got bit by something else first.  Anyway, I just hope those devs get an extension this year, too, and if some of our reasons can help push for that extension, why not try?  That's our position.  Nothing bad.  I don't like excuses either, but I'll take a break if one comes my way at this point.  Ultimately, we were aware of the risks of submitting the last day and decided to take it.

Just to clear that up: I hope I didn't imply that I thought you were making excuses. As far as I'm concerned, if you get an extension and your submission is accepted, that would be fine with me.

Doc

Spyn Doctor:

...you can then simply submit it again, with different content...

That would have been nice to know.  It would have made our risky move not so risky.

Well it turns out even though I got the codes from my submission, it wasn't recived.