One of the things that makes XBLIG such a great platform for new games is the level
of innovation and creativity that comes from the developers. Unrestricted by the
demands of a large studio, individual developers are able to take risks and try
new things. Hedge Wizard, from Zombie Bonsai,
is exactly one of those games that simply never would have come into existence in
a conventional games market.
I presume everyone knows about Google+ by
now, I've updated this site to include the new google +1 buttons on every blog and
review post. Now there's even more ways to tell other people you like stuff.
Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could play two of the worlds most
legendary games simultaneously? What? No? You've never felt the need to play Super
Mario Bros alongside Tetris? Fortunately even if you've never had this particular
desire, you are now able to experience the full delights of this fusion.
Breaking slightly with tradition today I'm going to review a game for Windows Phone
7.
Lushington Springs is a tower defence game. I've played a lot of tower defence games,
and I can tell you right now that it takes a lot to make me happy with this class
of game. You can't just stick any old static construction warfare game in front
of me and expect me to like it. It has to be something special. I've seen too many
to simply be impressed be the game mechanics anymore. Tower defence games are old
hat. I need something new. Lushington Springs gets everything, absolutely without
question, perfectly spot on, and even comes up with a few nice new touches to what
is classically a pretty repetitive genre.
Miner Dig Deep has sat close to the top of the XBLIG charts for quite a long time
now, and I've never really been attracted to it. It's mining I kept thinking, what
can be so interesting about mining. Well I finally decided to check it out and I
can tell you that as it turns out, mining is quite fun.
This is going to be a short review, because this is a simple game. You tap the buttons
in time to the beat to get your sheep to the end of the level. That's it. Simple
doesn't mean dull though. This game is awesome.
Yesterday I ended my three and a half year employment at Hadley Group Technology
and said goodbye to friends and colleagues. Today,
I start out alone with the launch of my new company, Creou Software.
Someone on the team that made Dirchie Kart has an unusual sense of humour. In the
opening sequence to the game they define the word "Dirchie" as "the word you use
when you can't think of the real name". Don't worry though, you don't need unusual
humour to enjoy this slightly quirky kart racer, you just need to tie a long pink
balloon around your head and go with the flow.
Web Gallery Processor is a .Net library that processes directories of images and
builds thumbnails, cover images and data models for online gallery pages. Targeted
for use by ASP.NET MVC websites WGP automates the process of gallery generation.
usersearch [/? | /A | searchdata] [/C:][N][F][D][S]
/A - Return all users
/? - Display this help
searchdata - The data to search users for (case insensitive)
/C - Specify the cateogies to search (omit to search all categories)
N = Name
F = Full Name
D = Description
S = SID
A mouse/touch operated spinner for Windows with customisable backgrounds. Can be
used a replacement for dice or for visually selecting items from a list.
Dual stick shooters. I genuinely thought that I'd had enough their thumb twirling
shootiness. I've played at least a dozen of them and I presumed that it was a genre
that had been well and truly flogged to death along with tower defence games. It
turns out I was wrong. It turns out that there is one more dual stick shooter that
deserves a mention.
I've recently been reading Ray Kurzweil's
The Singularity is Near. Kurzweil is a futurist and he most well known for
his work on a prediction made of the near future called the
technological singularity. First named as such by Vernor Vinge, and combined
with something Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns" he believes that
technological progress is going to continually increase it's rate of improvement
until sometime in the mid 21st century we will create an intelligence superior to
our own. Following this we will experience a rate of technological progress so explosive
that it can be considered a singularity. Borrowing the term from physics a technological
singularity, like it's physical counterpart, has an event horizon beyond which the
rules change so drastically predictions become near impossible. Kurzweil considers
this most likely to be triggered by an artificial intelligence surpassing human
capability. Such an intelligence would have the knowledge and ability to design
improved versions of itself at an ever increasing rate.
Firstly, You can now add comments to posts. Email addresses are optional,
HTML is disabled and approval is off for now, but if it gets abused by spammers
I'll have to think about turning some protection on. If you want to change the image
displayed alongside your comment you can signup to Gravatar.
Secondly, Facebook "like" and Twitter "Tweet" buttons are now included on every
news post and project article. This requires javascript for now, but I've got a non js version in the works.
I taught my 6 year old nephew a new phrase this week.
"Xbox Live Indie Games" It means "Really cool little games made by awesome
programmers in their bedrooms". Not a perfect definition perhaps but he's 6, give
it a few years and I'll explain about publishers and distribution networks.
"Like you?" he asked
"Perhaps one day I'll make one, but I'm not awesome enough yet"
"Oh yeah," he replied "I forgot that bit", seemingly unaware of his put down.
After the revelation of new words to the mind of a 6 year old, particularly ones
involving "XBox" and "Games", he was eager for an example. Being a typical 6 year
old boy he is a big fan of all things aerial so I had preselected a recently released
game from pocket starship called Rotor.
In this article I am going to explain the steps required to produce a physics based
collision between two circles and demonstrate how to handle the outcome.
There are many techniques to handling collisions, in this article I am going to
cover a purely vector based approach. Code samples and downloads are in C# using
XNA 4.0, but I will cover the algorithms in enough detail that they can easily be
re-implemented with the language and framework of your choice.
Fluid is an XBox Live Indie Game from regular XBLIG development team
Radiangames. It's been a busy year for Radiangames. Since being founded
in March Fluid was their 4th game, and was closely followed by 2 more to bring their
total to 6 games in 2010 with another set for release by the end of January 2011.
I've recently been playing two games that superficially could be considered very
similar. Far Cry 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (from now on referred to as
FC2 and MW2). For a second just ignore the setting and locations in which these
games take place, I want to focus on some subtleties of gaming style.
A friend thinks he can hack my site so here's the challenge
Nick. Insert the text "Hacked by Nick" into the footer of this page and
I'll buy you a pint after the Next NxtGenUG meetup provided you can show me how you
did it and help fix the hole.
Open to anyone else who thinks they're good enough =;)
[Disclaimer: My host doesn't know anything about this, so if you get into trouble
with them you are on your own]
I've submitted a
session for DD9. Voting is open until 31st of December, so if this is something
you are interested in learning about, please consider a vote.
If you have been following this series of posts you will now have your
LED circuit wired up with a resistor and ready to go. In this post I will
explain the program to control your circuit for both the Arduino and Netduino platforms.
Before you get started building your own electronic circuits you are going to need
to know a little bit about voltage, current and resistance. The relationship between
these three things is known as Ohms Law. In this post I'll explain the equation
and run through an example of how it's used.
In this post I'll be showing you what equipment you need to get you started with
programmable microcontrollers. If you haven't got your board yet, you can read about
some of the
available boards. in the first post in this series
Have you ever wanted your software to interact with something physical. What you
need is a a microcontroller. This series of post is a beginner's guide to microcontrollers.
I'll be showing you some of the available options, what equipment you need, and
most importantly how to get started with your first basic programs.
So what is an Microcontroller?
"A microcontroller is a computer on a single integrated circuit containing a CPU,
memory, and programmable input/output peripherals"
CPUs operate by processing a series of instructions which they perform to manipulate
data. Original 8086 CPUs provided 110 instructions (including 31 variations of the
conditional jump instruction) that can be utilised by the programmer. Modern CPUs
based on x86 also have many extension instruction sets such as MMX, SSE and 3DNow.
Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) aim to improve CPU efficiency and performance
by providing just a very small subset of instructions that can execute faster. Combined
together this reduced set of instructions are still capable of performing all of
the operations of a large set, but by providing far fewer instructions CPU designers
can make space and memory savings. The ARM CPUs are a well known example of a CPU
based on a RISC architecture.
A One Instruction Set Computer (OISC) takes the RISC architecture to it's logical
extreme. An OISC system has instruction set reduced right down to one.
There will be demos of two very affordable programmable microcontrollers and I'll
cover the absolute basics of getting started. I'll show you what you need and where
to get it. There will be code in both C and C# so there's a little for everyone
here.
Dave will also be doing a session on quantum computing.
Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend. If you aren't a member you can attend
2 sessions for free but please register first.
My brand new Netduino arrived this morning.
It's been on order for a while, but it has been more popular than the manufacturers
were expecting so it's taken them a while to catch up with orders. I suspect that
might have been something to do with
Scott Hanselman's blog posting on it.
It's pretty much ok on the face of it. It doesn't make me cringe like most past MS adverts have. It has a nice story. It
has a good tag line ("It's time for a phone to save us from our phones"), but it has a problem. It's advertising the wrong
thing.
It's advertising a mobile operating system. Now I'm a geek, I get excited about operating systems. That's
fine, but if Microsoft want this phone to do well they are going to have to attract more users than just the small crowd
who get excited by operating systems. I asked a non-geek friend what phone he had. He said "an iPhone". He didn't say
"an apple phone running iOS 4.1". My colleague owns "a HTC Desire" not "a phone running Android 2.2".
The focus needs to be on the device, not the OS. They could possibly get away with it if they could be like Apple and make
the OS synonymous with the device, but that would mean a single streamlined brand of hardware that people could identify
with. For MS to make this campaign work the devices need to be heavily restricted and so totally generic that the
choice of hardware becomes irrelevant. But the manufacturers will work against that. They are going to work hard to give
their device a unique selling point, to make it stand out from the others, which is why I suspect MS are playing a tricky
game here. They are competing with the hardware guys for brand identity rather than working with them.
Until we start seeing adverts and a marketing buzz around a device that people can actually purchase that I can talk about
with my non-developer friends the Windows Phone 7 OS is not going to gain traction.
"Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible,
easy-to-use hardware and software"
Arduino is a combination of a hardware package that is fully open and an SDK to
control the hardware. The fact that Arduino is an open platform means not only are
you free to download the specs and build the hardware for yourself, but there is
also a wide range of compatible projects with all kinds of custom modifications.
I've recently brought myself an Arduino Duemilanove and I'm slowly learning about how it works and looking for things to do with it. I'll be posting anything interesting I do here.
My copy of the first edition of Hacker Monthly
arrived this week and I'm impressed.
Hacker Monthly is a print magazine of articles from the website
Hacker News. If you haven't heard of Hacker news it is a site that collects
and rates news stories and articles for programmers and software developers. To
quote their own mandate
"Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only
interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting."
A few months ago (June to be precise) they started a print edition of the website.
Once a month the top stories would be collected and reformatted for print. Well
I finally got round to ordering the first edition and it arrived this week (yes,
I'm a little bit behind here I know)
For me, the best articles of the first edition were the two features. "Flying the
SR-71 Blackbird" which depicted one pilots experience of flying the plane that has
held the flight airspeed record since 1976. Followed by "A Dismal Guide to Concurrency",
an interesting discussion on the poor state of concurrent programming techniques.
All in all a great start and something I hope to read a lot more of. I've already
placed my order for the second edition.
Today I'm attending the UK Tech Days
event in London. On the agenda is Azure, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and IE9. It's
also a good chance to catch up with some friends I haven't seen in a while.
Update:
Steve Ballmer's rather more excitable than I expected him to be. It was an entertaining
keynote and it covered some good info on Microsoft's plans. There was an interesting
question raised in the Q&A session at the end; someone criticised Microsoft for
re-implementing existing open source projects and killing the open source communities
rather than working with the communities to build on their existing code base. What
was interesting about it though was that Steve made a note of the issue and said
he would pass the feedback to the relevant teams.
We will have to wait to find out if anything does change. It will be good to see
what has happened with jQuery occur more frequently, where MS has embraces an open
source project, offers support and integrates it within their tools.
Of the other sessions, much of the information provided was stuff I had heard before,
but there was the occasional snippet of new stuff. The IE9 session in particular
was largely new to me as I'm not as active in that field as the other areas. The
sessions were all described as "deep dive", but they were very much on the introductory
level in most cases.
Update 2:
Well it seems the question on Microsoft open source involvement came late to the
party. Just today MS have announced NuPack
a .net package manager. What's important though is how it came about. NuPack is
a joint MS/Community project that started life as an open source project "Nu" and
an internal project "NPack". When MS realised the duplication, they got the external
community involved and combined to form NuPack. The core team that works on NuPack
will now consist of both internal MS guys and community developers working at the
same time to drive the project. Are we seeing a new face to Microsoft that embraces
the community and works with them. I hope so.
After several weeks my new JavaScript + jQuery enhanced image gallery menu is now
live.
Following a great presentation by George
Adamson last month at NxtGenUG I
decided it was about time I tried out this jQuery gizmo. This is the result.
If you browse to the main gallery index
page and click on a gallery you'll get a nice little animation and a cross
fade while the gallery loads. Full history/back button support included, with a
unique URL for each gallery. It will also fall back to a HTML only non-enhanced
style if there isn't any JavaScript enabled. The gallery images themselves are presented
with a slightly modified SlimBox
2.
At some point in the future I'll package this all up along with the server side
gallery generator module and post it here for others to use.
I've been working on a news processor for the website and it's now up and running.
This is its first iteration so I'm sure there will be more improvements to come.
For now though any new additions to the site will be announced here automatically
so feel free to subscribe to the feed for any updates.
Update:
I've now fixed the bug that was causing news to be sorted incorrectly. It turns
out that I forgot that my server was in America and those guys do their dates differently
(mm/dd/yyyy).
All fixed now - CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-GB").
