Christmas Bash 2010

The Christmas Bash is becoming a tradition. From modest beginnings a couple of years ago we now have a well established setup which this year included Team Fortress, Track Mania, Kinect, PS Move and Band Hero. Along with the ever popular word search. In fact I was aghast to see a bunch of students ignoring their gaming terminals and instead searching through the grid for such words as “Battleships”, “Theatre” and of course “wordsearch”.

The gathering actually established a new record for bashes. From 22 pizzas to nothing in around 6 minutes. Amazing.

There are more pictures on Flickr. If you have any of your own please tag them hullxmasbash2010.

Busy Marking

If you have been trying to find me over the last couple of days you would have been out of luck. I’ve been in the First Year labs marking student programs. Actually great fun (but also very hard work). Saw some stuff that could easily go to market, which was very nice.

Just half a day of marking left and then we can get on with the Christmas Bash.

Mad Game Development in the Press

You might remember our Mad Game Development a few weeks ago. Fifteen teams spent 24 hours on campus writing a game. Great fun. Writer Peter Gothard (now of GamesTM Magazine) came along for the ride (actually it was his idea….)

Anyhoo, he has now written up the whole thing as a superb article in 360 Magazine this month. With pictures of all the teams and screenshots of their games it is well worth a read. In all good newsagents now..

Cheese Clipart

You wouldn’t believe how much pictures cost for games. I can get a picture of a piece of cheese for a pound I can use in a web page. If I want to put it into a game I’m going to have to spend an awful lot more than that. More than the price of a piece of cheese…..

So today I was in the conservatory photographing cheese for use in my next cheese based XNA game project.  And next I’m going to eat it all.

LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone Review

Don’t forget my Optimus Quest, where you can win an LG Optimums 7.

For the last few days I’ve been using an LG Optimus 7 Windows phone. I really like it. Actually, I like all the Windows phone models. They all run the same operating system and so their look and feel is going to be the same. They also have to hit the same platform specification which means that display, camera, performance and battery life are going to be good.

However is interesting how different phone manufacturers have taken the platform and worked at making it their own. LG have done quite a few things to make their phone special. They also seem to have had some luck getting access to parts of the hardware that other phones can’t reach.

The phone itself is pleasingly weighty and is rounded to fit the hand very well. The back has a brushed metal finish that pulls off the trick of being shiny but not showing any nasty fingerprints. The screen is bright and clear and very responsive. Unlike other Windows Phone devices it actually has physical buttons along the front which add a nice tactile feel to using it. Inside the phone you can find 16G of memory, which is useful if you have a Zune pass and want to store a bunch of music on the device. From a hardware point of view the design is nicely understated and classy.

Each Windows Phone manufacturer has their own application store and this is where the LG phone starts to pull away from the crowd a bit.  For a start there are more than a handful of programs in there and a few of them are actually useful and fun. The Panorama shot makes a reasonable job of controlling the camera, letting you stitch together up to 5 pictures to make a panorama. The Voice to text application takes what you say and puts it into a Tweet, Note or email. And it works too. The Scan Search application is very interesting in that it is the only program I’ve ever seen on Windows Phone that actually uses the compass and a video overlay from the camera to provide an augmented reality display that points you at nearby points of interest. 

If you are in the market for a Windows Phone I’d start with a look at this one.

Got your Zune Pass Yet?

If you’ve got a Windows Phone and you haven’t checked out the Zune pass yet then you are missing out. Zune pass is an “all you can eat” deal which lets you download and store loads of music onto mobile devices and PCs. You pay a monthly fee to keep the music going and you can have as much of it with you as you can fit onto your Windows Phone or Zune. You can chop and change your tunes as much as you like and keep a different range of sounds on each platform. Of course the bad news is that if you stop paying, it stops playing but I think that for around nine quid a month it is actually a pretty good deal.

I really like the way that you can hear a tune you like and then have the whole album on your phone a few minutes later. Windows Phone even has the amazing Shazam application (one of the few programs that I reckon is actually powered by magic) that will put a name to tunes that you play to it, to make the process easier. I’ve been happily downloading content and listening to it. Current favourites is “Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter Plays the Hits”. Country music (and other stuff) done real well.

Rob Miles XNA 3.0 eBook at Half Price

On Friday 10th December (although I think it might extend over the weekend too) you can get a copy of my XNA programming book as an eBook for half price. Use the discount code DDXNA at the O’Reilly book web page.

This brings the price of the book down to not much more than a couple of Big Mac meals. Well worth it (and a lot less fattening).

Win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone

Coming to your pocket soon?

Thanks go to Sheryl for sending me an LG Optimus 7 phone to take a look at. She has also sent one for me to give away, so I proudly announce the “Optimus Quest” competition.

Send me your ideas for Windows Phone Marketplace programs and I’ll give the phone as a prize to the best idea. You can find full details in the Rob Miles Optimus Quest Competition pages.

I’m going to be using an Optimus 7 (not the prize one – that is staying in the box all shiny and new) for the next few days and I’ll let you know what I think of it. First impressions – very nice indeed.

Final Battleships Tutorial Podcasts Available

I managed to find a quiet time at work today to record the last two podcasts for the 08101 Battleships tutorial. You can find all the tutorials here:

• Session 1: Getting Started
• Session 2: Handling player Moves
• Session 3: Making Computer Moves
• Session 4: Creating the Game Behaviour

These are tutorials to support programming coursework set for our First Year programming course. The students have been asked to produce a C# program that will take the part of one player in the game of Battleships.

Album Shower on Marketplace

Hot on the heels of Cheese Lander, you can now download and play with my second Windows Phone application. Album Shower displays your album artwork as a moving display on the phone screen. Touching any album starts playback. You can find out more at the Zune Marketplace link for the application.

Snowed in Phone Fun

If you ask for “Hot Chocolate Deluxe” at the Purple Cow you get this. We had to take the sweets home for later.Fantastic.

Spent today snowed in working on some more Windows Phone fun and games. (although we did step out for Sunday Lunch at the Purple Cow in Cottingham – have the gammon with two eggs on top it is ace)

If you are a Windows Phone developer (and you should be) you must get the Windows Phone October update. This gives you some nice extras, including a way of debugging Windows Phone applications that use the media content on the phone. I’m finding this very useful just at the moment. And remember that if you write Visual Basic there is now an Windows Phone Visual Basic SDK just for you.

Cheese Lander has Landed

Anyone with a “Cheese Lander” shaped hole in their lives now has somewhere to turn. For the princely sum of 79 British Pence (that’s a couple of normal Mar Bars or one and a bit of the really large ones) you can now own a copy of “The Best Cheese Landing Game in the World”. That I know of. In Hull. Written by me.

Anyhoo, if you want to be able to whip out your Windows Phone at a party and say “Anyone here fancy landing some cheese?” you can find it on Windows Phone Marketplace here.

New 08101 Tutorial Podcast

I took the camera out when I went to buy some milk first thing. Glad that I did.

Even more snow on the church

Can you use your powers of detection to discover where I’ve hidden the two crows in this picture?

Oh, and there is a new Battleships tutorial available. You can find it here.

Watch this

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs13/f/2007/077/2/e/Animator_vs__Animation_by_alanbecker.swf

Absolutely brilliant. And thanks to Rodney for the link.

08101 Battleships Tutorial Podcast

Another day of stuck at home. Not that I’ve spent all my time here. I also managed to find time to walk through a snowstorm and then queue for 45 minutes in the Post Office. What joy.

Anyhoo, since it is looking unlikely that I’ll be able to make my tutorial tomorrow I’ve recorded another podcast for those on the 08101 module who are just getting started with the coding.

http://cid-a4ce6a659fd80c02.office.live.com/self.aspx/University%20Videos/08101%20Battleships%20Tutorial%201.wmv

I’ll have another one tomorrow for the next stage.

Lecturing from Home

Coming to a Christmas Card near you soon….

Snow on a Snowman. How original.

Did my Software Engineering lecture after all (but not at 12:15). I’ve recorded it as a screencast.  If you are on the 08220 module and want to take a look you can find it here.

Update 2020: It seems that the original file has fallen off my office space. I’ve moved it to YouTube:

University Closed

Hull city centre. One of the many places I can’t get to today.

The university is closed today. Never known this before in all my years working at the place. We’ve closed early on occasion so that people can get home before the worst of the weather, but even in the floods a few years back the Hull campus stayed open.

But today it is shut. I was all togged up for a brisk walk in the snow to the office but the message came on the radio that there was no point.

My 12:15 lecture (which was going to be all about the magic of creating control behaviours in software) is now postponed and will now take place next week.

Weather permitting.

Cold Weather Blues

The weather today is so cold it seems to be making my mouse move slowly.

Winter Prep

This should keep us going for a while.

A tip for keeping up with the Joneses

Make the neighbours think you have Microsoft Kinect by opening the living room curtains and waving your arms and jumping up and down in front of the TV.