True Story

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Whilst scanning the receipt for my MacBook (which I needed to do to validate the purchase date and get the broken battery replaced) the battery in my MacBook Pro failed.

XNA at DevDays 09

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My final session of the trip had me in front of another great audience. Thanks folks. I’ve put the code for all the demonstrations here.

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This is my setup for the presentation. If you want to find the other pictures you might be in, you can find them on my Flickr pages.

After the talk it was off to grab a taxi to the station and then on to a very nice train (they have very nice trains in Holland) back to the airport and a plane home.

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I like the seafood bar at Schipol airport. Not that raw fish before a flight strikes me as a massively good idea.

XNA Lerp

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I’m going to start blogging things that I find useful, so that I can find them again when I need them. You might find them useful too, with a bit of luck.

Lerp is a new thing in XNA 3.0. It lets you find colours between other colours. You can use it for blending, so that you can create a smooth range of colours from one extreme to another.  It is very easy to use:

Color newColor = Color.Lerp( firstColor, secondColor, amount );

You give it the first colour, the second colour and the amount you want to travel between them, in the range 0-1. If the amount is small (close to 0) you will get mostly first colour. If the amount is large (close to 1) you will get mostly second colour.

I use it to make darker versions of a particular colour, so I can create fake lighting effects:

Color shadowColor = Color.Lerp( objectColor, Color.Black, 0.2f );

This produces a darker version of objectColor. To make it even darker, increase the value 0.2 to a larger one.

You can use this to produce tinting effects too.

World Domination

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I’m going to take over the world. Haha.

Point the Camera at the Screen

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I’m getting ready for my DevDays session later this week. I’m demonstrating some .NET Micro Framework devices that are a bit small, and so I thought I’d use a webcam to show close-ups of the toys. I was testing it just now and of course I pointed it at the screen.

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Cool eh?

If you are going to DevDays then feel free to come along. The Geek Night should be great fun.

Breaking in With Thirteen One Magazine

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I met up today with Craig from Thirteen 1 magazine. They are doing a set of articles on breaking into the games industry, and I’m going to be recording some video podcasts for them about learning XNA.

Don’t worry, the camera won’t be pointed at me. Instead I’m going to capture the steps you need to follow to set up your computer and then write some XNA games. Should be fun.

Angels and Demons Movie Review

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Apparently the Catholic Church is not very happy with the film “Angels and Demons”, from the Dan Browne novel with the same name. I hadn’t expected the Vatican to have a movie review side to their business, but having seen the film I know what they mean.

I thought the Tomb Raider films had pretty much scraped the barrel on dodgy plotlines, evil blokes in cassocks and thousand year old secret societies. I was wrong. And at least with them we got Lara Croft to look at and some nice jungle scenery every now and then. Here we just got Tom Hanks with his furrowed brow and the inside of some churches. And a lady physicist in high heels who occasionally popped up to translate some Latin or spout some duff physics.

It took all my iron will and resolve to keep from having hysterics when the bad guy, thoroughly nasty all the way to his “straight from central casting” steel rimmed glasses, and having just laid waste to half of the Italian police force, pointed his weapon at our hero and said “I will not shoot you, because you do not carry a gun and I have not been ordered to”. I’m pretty sure that as he turned away I heard him add “..and also because you are Tom Hanks”.

The good news is that I spotted the bad guy right at the start. The better news for me is that I did this without having had to wade through the book first.

And to think I could have gone into the screen next door and watched Star Trek again. What a waste.

Windows 7 is Speeding Me Up

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Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.

In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.

Star Trek Review… but not as we know it

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First things first. The movie delivers. From exploding planets to starship battles to green women in bed with James T, Kirk. They even had a chap turn up with a forgettable name in a red outfit who joined the mission and then was summarily disposed of. The only thing missing was a self destruct sequence, but then blowing up the brand new Enterprise in the first movie is probably not a plan I suppose.

The elephant in the room is of course that once you open up the possibility of alternative timelines (and Star Trek has been doing this for years – at least in this timeline) then they can do pretty much anything they like with the plots and characters. So they have. And it is great.

The new Captain Kirk works really well. And doesn’t have an actor who. puts. extra. full. stops. in. the. middle. of. his. sentences.  However, the new Spock is even better. They seem to have a found cast of folks I’ve never seen before and this is fine too, because you are seeing the character first, which with this kind of baggage is the only way to travel.

Everything works, everything is shiny, and I’m definitely going to see it again.

Let’s hope that that the inevitable sequels are as good.