Half way to Paradise

I got a new game on Saturday. Burnout Paradise. Number one son said I would like it, and he is right. I got the PS3 version, but it is also available for Xbox 360. I've always been a big fan of Burnout games. I seem to remember getting at least the first couple and greatly enjoying them. The format of the Burnout games have been pretty much the same up until now. You work your way through a serious of increasingly difficult races of slightly different formats unlocking new challenges as you go until you either complete the game or lose interest because it gets too hard.

Guess which one I do.

Anyhoo, this format has been seriously tinkered with. There is still progression, but it is much more free form. You can drive anywhere and try anything in the huge city that is laid out in front of you. Traffic lights at junctions serve as the kicking off point for a variety of different racing missions. Win a few and your licence gets upgraded, you get a bigger car and so on. The sense of place is hugely impressive, you really do feel that you are in a genuine location. The driving is good, although with Burnout I always feel that I am flying the car rather than steering it. The crashes have to be seen to be believed. Bits come off your car and get scrunched up in a most realistic manner. And yet...

They have taken away the big green arrows. I used to like these. They told you when and where to turn. In the new game it is all about learning routes and finding shortcuts. And the driving map doesn't rotate to face the way you are going. You have to figure out orientation from a little pointer. I hate having to do that. You get some help telling you when to change direction, but it didn't do much for me. You can lose a race because you miss the turnoff. You can't easily resume a race if you get left behind. And the weather seems to always be the same. Bright sunshine and harsh shadows. The game is undoubtedly richer and more complex than it used to be, but it is also harder to figure out what to do next.

Some aspects remind me a lot of Mid Town Madness, a Microsoft game of some time back, where you had a whole city to play with and a bunch of mad drivers to take on. However, there was much more of a sense of fun about that affair, I used to love racing  using buses. 

Burnout Paradise is nearly a great game. If you want the impression of driving round a city the only game that gets close as far as I'm concerned is Need for Speed Most Wanted, which I reckon is much more fun (even though the graphics in Burnout are better). The network play could be great, but I've not tried it yet.  It gets so much right, and is so well constructed that I really should love it more. I enjoy playing it, but I don't have the big stupid grin on my face that I get when I play some other driving games.

Buy my book. And a Hammer.

You know my book? The one I never mention? Well, it is presently ranked as the 434,444th best seller on Amazon in the 'states.  This is quite good, but not great. Yet. Feel free to mosey on down and order your copy. And when you do, you could also get yourself a nice hammer. I'd just love to see this down in the "Customers who bought this book also bought...." entry on the page for my book..

Update on 2008-02-05 08:47 by Rob

On the other hand, perhaps one of these might be more appropriate.

Friday Four Fifteen Club

I'm starting a new club for first year students. It is for those "lucky" enough to have the 4:15 pm slot on Friday afternoon. The weather on Friday was horrid, and by the end of the day most of us felt like we had done enough for the week. Thanks for turning up folks.

This is not the entire group, I've left part of the room off so that you can claim that you were really there.....

FragFest Fun

Hull Com Soc had a fragfest today. I took along the big camera and the fancy lenses to try and grab some pictures. vivaladan was kind enough to let me help with some goes at World In Conflict which was a hoot (although I think I liked it best because we won). I'm going to get a copy of the game and turn up early at the next event with my laptop. Oh yes.

The pictures turned out OK as well.

Game in Progress

How to stop your laptop overheating

Artistic Camerashake

There are some more on Flickr.

Rob Sez is Coming

The latest very silly game is on the stocks. (or should that be in the stocks). I've even got the title screen finished, as you can see above. The letters rotate and jiggle in a most engaging manner, and purists will note that the shadows for the text are in exactly the right place for all of them.

Clever eh?

Now all I need to do is write the game itself....

Old Funny Stuff

I wrote this ages ago, and I still like it:

"The dish was concerned about the way that her father kept introducing her to spoons."

Get Your Free XNA Chapters Here

Well, actually, not here. They are at VerySillyGames. These are actually the PDF files for chapters 1 and 2 that went to the printers. I've also included all the sample code so that you can make yourself a moodlight. I've posted them in celebration of the fact that the book is now being printed, ready for a release towards the end of Feb.

I was funnier when I was younger

For some reason (actually a search to find the seven signs of ageing - don't ask) I found my way back to my old Crazy World site today. I had a read of some of my old posts, circa 2005.

I was much funnier then.

Perhaps the extra  cares of the world in the intervening three years have worn me down. Perhaps I have run out of whimsey.  Either way, I have now resolved to up the light hearted content (and probably the number of puns) and really, really write another Trip Hazard episode.

And maybe a sequel to The Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom.

You have been warned.

Update on 2008-01-31 16:58 by Rob

I've been worrying about this. Perhaps I'm just more grown up than I used to be. After all, by my reckoning I've got three of the seven signs of ageing.

Happy New Semester

The new semester started today. Did my first lecture at 12:15. Didn't manage to escape until ten minutes after the finish, because there was so much discussion about what I'd said. I love lectures like that. At lunchtime I went out for a walk and took the little camera with me. Whenever I travel far afield I take lots of pictures, and I really must remember that there are some nice bits just around my workplace too.

I love the colours on this tree

Go Hannah Pickard

Green campus

The Venn Building

Flower Photos

I thought I'd take some photos of the flowers I got on Friday. Seemed to come out OK.

In One Ear

Since my early experiments with speech recognition I had been looking out for a decent head set. I was really pleased when I discovered some Logitech headphones at a knockdown price in our local Staples store.  I took them home and plugged them in and started talking.  And they didn't work very well. 

The sound was indistinct and the recognition was very poor.  I spent a while fiddling with the settings and re-training but it was nowhere near as good as it used to be.  At this point I decided that I might have bought a duff device so I did a little investigating.

Rather surprisingly, results seemed to be equally bad with the headset microphone switched off or even unplugged.  After some investigation I discovered the speech recognition software was still using the microphone inside the computer.  It seems that it doesn't always automatically select the headset microphone.

However, now I've managed to make the switch must handle the speech recognition works an awful lot better.

A tip, you can disable and enable sound devices by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and clicking Manage audio devices.  This opens up the Sound dialogue. When you disable a device it rather annoyingly vanishes from the list of devices. You can get a device back again, so you can re-enable it, by right clicking in the device window and selecting show disabled devices from the context menu that appears.

Goodbye to Jane

Today we said goodbye to Jane Evison. The name might not be familiar, but if you've ever been to one of the degree ceremonies at Hull you will have seen her handiwork in action. Over the years she has worked behind the scenes to make everything seem as effortless as possible. She is a great person to work with, although she doesn't suffer fools particularly gladly, which makes her getting on well with me especially surprising.

We had a leaving do for her this afternoon, she said some thank-you's and rather surprised both myself and James, the other graduands marshal, by giving us both a bunch of flowers each. Thanks a bunch (literally) - although I now have to explain to number one wife why I'm being given flowers....

Good luck in the future Jane, have fun.

Science Graduation Ceremony

Today I did my final routine for this set of ceremonies. These were some students from our department, who I'd actually taught, which was nice. As a celebration I took the big camera and the fancy lens and tried to get a photograph of everyone at once. The light could have been better, but the results do seem to be recognisable. Although I can't find myself in the pictures anywhere....

Front of house graduands

Stage graduands

Marshal's eye view of the Vice Chancellors speech

After the ceremony

The weather was a bit dull and blustery, but a good time was had by all.

There are a few more pictures on my Flickr Account. Click on any of the above images to go there.

Degrees of Success

I was Graduands Marshal at three degree ceremonies today. Wore the hat, did the intro and got everyone down and into the right place. Great fun, if hard work. All the audiences were terrific and everyone played their part just right, even the nervous graduands who were all splendid. Well done to you all. I'm doing my final intro tomorrow for our Computer Science students, which will be quite an occasion. I might even try out a new joke...

We only had one Honorary Graduate, but he was great. Sir Michael Alan Willcocks, KCB accepted his degree with an excellent and self deprecating speech. Most speakers at degree ceremonies try to pass on some wisdom to the audience, and Sir Michael was no exception. He said something which I think is actually excellent advice. He said that if you have a problem, rather than worrying about it you should try to do something about it. If you can't do anything about it, it is not a problem - it is a fact.

I am Legend (and very depressed)

Went out to the movies tonight, I am Legend. We left the house with the intention of seeing the St. Trinians movie,  but we thought that something a little less lightweight might hit the spot better.

I am Legend is not lightweight. It is actually a zombie flick. I'm not saying that it is based on the video game "Resident Evil", all I'm saying is that the producer, the director, the writer and Will Smith must have played the game quite a lot. And got killed a lot.

The premise (the last man left alive is not alone) is quite an interesting one, but it has been done before. The whole film is basically a long downward spiral, with an uplifting bit at the end to stop the audience from all diving under busses after they leave the cinema.

And finally, a note to world leaders, when someone called Dr. Crippen invents a virus that purports to kill cancer, I think we should be very careful about letting her use it on real people.....

Evil Exam Invigilation

This morning found me performing an unexpected Exam invigilation in the Sports Centre. I was down as reserve invigilator and when someone didn't turn up I had greatness thrust upon me. I wasn't that keen to be honest, until I saw the content of the paper I was invigilating, which had the wonderful title of "Evil". Thinking I might be good at evil, since I practice a lot at home apparently, I had a look at the questions. They were very thought provoking and I quite fancied having a go at them. The last one was "Is evil art?". Profound stuff.

Then tonight it was down to the pub for the first Preston Foster Appreciation Society meeting in a long while. A great time was had which, to be honest, was not very profound. For some reason I found the following very funny.

"I was feeling a little under the weather last week, so I went to the doctor to find out what it might be. He told me it was raining."

Perhaps you had to be there.

Worst Day of the Year?

Apparently today is officially the "Worst Day of the Year". A combination of Christmas credit card bills, lousy weather and failed New Resolutions conspire to make today the worst day ever.

But not for me.

I've just found out that Hull University has got four teams into next round of the UK Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Development competition. Congratulations to Stuart, Kamilla, Callum, Ashley, David, Kenny, Sam, Nicholas, Anthony, Jon and Jonathan who make up the successful teams. Well done everyone! What is especially impressive is that at least two of the teams are made up of first year students who only joined the department in September last year.

The next stage for each team is a trip to Manchester to further develop their competition entries and perfect their pitching skills, leading to a Dragon's Den style final in London later this year.

I can't wait.

Free Wallpaper

Whilst playing with Photoshop I've dug out one of my old pictures to use as desktop wallpaper. It is a tiny bit out of focus, but the colours are very nice.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6

Microsoft have stopped making my favourite image manipulation tool. The 2006 version of Digital Image Suite was the last, which is rather sad as I always quite liked the program. Unfortunately, the code is showing its age a bit now, and it doesn't handle raw camera images very well, and so I've had to look around for a new image processing program. Paint .NET is great for a freebie, but doesn't do much with raw images and I also wanted some image cataloguing tools.

So last week I downloaded a 30 day evaluation copy of Photoshop Elements from Adobe, and this week I bought a book which tells me how to use the program (essential in this case because even a seasoned computer user like me finds some of the ways the program works to be quite opaque). Next week (or perhaps the week after) I might even buy the software itself.

I've always had a kind of "dis-affection" for Adobe software. It never seems to quite work properly for me. Their PDF reader is a huge, unwieldy beast for something which is essentially a file viewer, and it really upsets me when such a lowly program insists on rebooting my machine when it has updated itself. It used to annoy me even more when it hid the update confirmation window behind everything else, and brought my machine to a standstill waiting for a response. Having said that, the latest reader does have some rather nice tools that you can use to annotate PDFs which are rather cute, although I guess they contribute to the "bloatiness" of the program and make it much slower to load when all I want to do is look at a document.

Anyhoo, I digress. The Elements installation went smoothly, and I quickly had a picture open for edit. And I got that sinking feeling again. All I wanted to do was darken one part of the image, to hide some of the background. An adjustment layer might have hit the spot, if I could have figured out how to mask it over the bits that I need. A darkening brush might have been nice too if I could figure out how to use it. There's usually a scene in most action movies where the hero gets into the pilot's seat in a helicopter, spaceship, ocean liner or some such and is confronted by a huge, complicated array of controls. You then get a close up of their baffled face as they scan the buttons, dials and levers in front of them. I get that face whenever I use Elements. Stuff I never want to do ("Conte Crayon" anyone?) is right in front of me and stuff I always want to do ("make this bit darker")  is nowhere to be seen. In the end I gave up and resolved to buy a book.

I then had a go with the photo catalogue software. Now, granted, bringing 50 gigs of images into the index in one go might be pushing it a bit, but I was hoping for something a bit more useful then a terse "import failed" message after thirty minutes of hard disk rattling.  I imported the pictures in a directory at a time and this time it worked OK. Then Elements started nagging me to do a backup of my catalogue so eventually I said yes, hooked up an external drive and pointed the program at it. At which point it put 24 thousand images into the root directory of the disk. Most backup programs that I've used create a directory to put their files in. Not Elements. Actually, kudos to Vista here, in that I managed to select all the files and put them into a more sensible place without the file explorer window tipping over.

However, the program is growing on me bit by bit. I've been reading the book I bought to find out what it can do, and it really is a powerful beast. And perhaps I've been a bit harsh in expecting it to just work. We shall see.

Update on 2008-01-21 12:16 by Rob

Apparently, in the jungle all the image editing is done by "Photoshop Elephants".

Words fail me

"Waiter, why have you served me a dictionary with my meal?"

"Well sir, you did ask for the full English breakfast".