X48 Cheesy Success

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Last weekend four of our students went over to Derby to take part in the X48 Marathon gamecamp.  The idea was to create a game from scratch using C# and XNA 3.0 based on a particular theme. So it was that Harry Overs, Rob Eagle, Rob Hubbucks and Craig Dickman from our second year headed over to Derby to rub shoulders with lots of fellow game developers, many of whom were students from Masters levels courses.

Our lowly second years actually did quite well for themselves. The theme was “evolution” and by the simple technique of not sleeping for a day and a half they managed to come up with “Evo Fighter” a beat-em-up that merges arcade punching action with an exposition of the ideas of Darwin.

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Part of the very funny start screen….

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Evo Fighting Action

This managed to walk off with the “Cheesiest Game Award”. When the cheese arrives from Derby, I’ll put up a picture of the team with their prize. I’m very proud of them, and like to think I have taught them well. You can find out more about them here.

Apparently Channel 4 were there filming, so there might be some TV coverage too.

I’m hoping that the competition will become an annual event. I’m tempted to dress up as a student (some say I already do) so that I can take part if it runs again. Many thanks to everyone at Derby, Microsoft and Pixel-Lab for setting it up.

Off the Air

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After a great weekend, everything broke. On Monday a router failed at my service provider, which knocked out the IP address that all my blog pages live at.

This probably worried me a lot more than it should. After all, it is not as if I run a business from these pages. But the thought that the link to the outside world was broken was kind of upsetting. I’ve been blogging for a long time, and it is the first time that I’ve been “off the air” like this.

Anyhoo, the new address is now in place, and you should be able to read this.

Splendid Sunday

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This is turning out to be an excellent weekend. Went out for a superb meal at Fudge yesterday and spent this morning making things work that work (actually, number one son wrote most of the code – I see myself as more of an ideas man).

We now have multiple sensors talking to our .NET Micro Framework device and the next thing is to build the emulation environment and interface the actual sensor electronics.

This seemed as good a time as any to take a break and watch a dodgy James Bond movie, and so we did. There was no particular agreement on who was the best Bond, I think your choice says as much about your generation as it does your taste, but there seemed to be no doubt who was the worst, with Roger Moore coming out on top.

I think the film was “For Your Eyes Only”, but they made a whole bunch of anonymous Bond films in the eighties, and it could have been any one of them. It did have some hilarious “Hi-Tech” bits, where Bond could be seen manhandling what looked like RL-02 disk packs on a Digital Equipment machine (which as I remember provided a whole 20Mbytes of storage). Bond then spent some time sitting in red lighting doing something fatuous with a really old display, before going out and failing to get killed by idiot assassins.

Ideal Sunday afternoon fare.

Mad March Bash

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After the roaring success of the Xmas Bash I am organising a follow up, the Mad March Bash, for Wed. 25th of March, starting at 4:00 pm in Room 312 of the Robert Blackburn Building and finishing at 8:00 pm.

There will be Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Zombie Panic, Wii Sports, Dance Mats, Rock Band and an all-new feature, the Tag Treasure Hunt.

Pizza, pop and sweeties will be provided.

Entrance to the event is by ticket only. Tickets will be on sale in the Departmental Office, priced at 2 pounds each, from 2:00 pm on 19th March. As last time, numbers are limited, so make sure that you get yours early.

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Saturday Open Day

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We had our biggest open day of the year today. Perhaps the biggest we have ever had. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was great to see you all. As usual I took a snap of the assembled multitude:

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Funny how people always sit at the back in lecture theatres…

I gave my talk as usual, and I must apologise for the jokes. But, of course, I will be using them again…

We gave away a PSP to one lucky winner, ticket number 65 as I remember.

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Warren, using his specially big hand to give the prize away. Note cunning product placement of C# Yellow Book (you can get yours at http://www.csharpcourse.com/)

I went outside with the big camera and ran straight into a rather nice photo-op.

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I just love skies like these.

Anyway, thanks very much for coming and I hope you all have a good journey home.

Red Nose Day

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Well, I did my lecture. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was fun. I’ll post the video tonight, once I’ve got it off my little camera. If you have any pictures or video of the fun and games, please get in touch and I’ll set up a group somewhere to share the magic…

We did rather well on the day:

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..what it is all about. I’ll take it down to the bank later today. If you want to add to the pile, just drop by my office or sponsor me at:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob

I hit my target, and so I’ve moved it up a bit.

Update

on 2009-03-13 20:51 by Rob

We've counted all the money, and it turns out that the bucket had two hundred and fifty eight pounds 11 pence in it. All through the afternoon people were dropping by who couldn't make it to the lecture and they were dropping more cash in. Thanks to all the staff and students who were so generous. We are going to take the cash down to the bank tomorrow and this should bring the total earnings to well over 500 quid, which is ace!

I've put the lecture slides up here.

Lecture in Rhyme for Red Nose Day

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I will be giving a Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme at 11:15 on Friday 13th of March in the Foss Building Lecture Theatre 1. An older boy told me to do it.

The lecture is part of the 08120 Programming 2 course and will be on the subject of class design in C#.

Students who turn up in fancy dress will get out half price.

If you want to sponsor me (and you do, really you do) then you can visit:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob

Jetlagged Poetry

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You can’t beat being busy with jetlag. In between writing deathless prose for lectures, trying to find out why we have no hot water and where on earth that thing is that I put down a second ago I’ve been trying to write some poetry.

I’ve decided to give a lecture in rhyme on Friday as part of Comic Relief. I’ve loads of other things that I should be doing, but I’ve given them over the last twenty years or so, and I feel that the tradition really should continue.

I’m going to be talking about class based design in C#. The tradition is that I have to pick up whatever is in the course at that point and give a proper lecture on that subject, but entirely in rhyme. I did think about making the whole thing up on the day, but that is potentially dangerous, and so it was into Powerpoint and on with the rhyming dictionary…

Mended

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I love a happy ending. The leak has gone. I tracked it down to the pipe in the wall near the inside stop tap. Dave from next door came round and pulled out the offending item.

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Now that is what I call a hole. The water was really spurting out once we got the plaster off it. Turns out that sometimes the flux used to solder the pipe connections tends to corrode the pipe itself. Which is not good.

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This is what it looks like now. Much better. Thanks Dave.

The only thing that worries me is that I have a house full of this pipe, so I suppose I’m going get this every now and them. Ah well, at least I have one less now.

Stealthy Leakage

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Somewhere in our house, water is escaping. I can hear it. At three in the morning I can detect the tiny whoosh from the pipes when nothing should be moving.

I’ve checked all the obvious places. Replaced a few likely suspects. But the noise remains. Now, normally I don’t have a problem finding out where water is coming from. Ceilings change shape, objects underneath the flow become unexpectedly glossy, or suddenly go mouldy. But this leak is stealthy. There is no evidence at all. Anywhere. Everything is just as it should be, apart from the sound.

At one point I started to doubt myself. However, Dave came round last night and he heard it too. And (and this is the clincher) he heard it stop when I turned the water off.  The prevailing wisdom is that a pipe underneath the floorboards somewhere downstairs is leaking straight down into the ground. In the fullness of time this probably means that we will have our own indoor swimming pool, followed shortly by a moat.

I hate having a problem I don’t know how to solve. If this was a programming fault I’d be bunging breakpoints in, adding debugging code and generally getting to the bottom of things. If it was a piece of hardware I’d be working out where best to hit it. But when a pipe just disappears into a wall it is kind of hard to discover what is going on. I think I might need to engage stronger powers than mine on this one, in other words it might be time to find a plumber…

Universe 2 Rob 1

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I thought I was doing OK this morning. I’d gone from broken to mended, with all my demo programs for the Portugal sessions working fine. I even sent a Tweet out to Twitter bragging about this.

Big mistake.

There was just one final link in the chain that I need to sort out, which is the tiny router I carry around with me to demos. There is nothing quite like having your own little network to hand, with an address range that you know and love. And I can even use the router to find out what addresses have been allocated so that they are easy to locate from Visual Studio. Unless, of course, I lose the admin password for the thing.

Which I have just done. Or the universe has engineered for my personal torment. Or whatever.  Either way up, I foresee a certain amount of frantic pinging before the session.

Oh well, if you don’t learn something from an experience you really should not be in the game. I’m never going to brag about making something work. Ever again.

New Dishwasher Time

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Talking of burning, we noticed that the dishwasher was making a crackling noise and burning smell this afternoon which stopped when we sprinted up to it and ripped its plug out of the wall socket. I think it is proper broken.

All this was made especially exciting by the fact that I was talking to number one son on the notebook at the time using the webcam, and so we had to carry “him” downstairs so that he could share in the experience, but perhaps without the smell of smoke…

Presidential Priorities

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I had a call with Devon from Microsoft in the 'states scheduled for late this afternoon. We agreed that it might be a good idea to postpone it slightly. After all, you don't want to have to answer the question "Where were you when America inaugurated Barack Obama as president?" with "Oh, I was on the phone at the time".