Star Wars Xbox 360
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There is absolutely no reason why I need the above. But that doesn’t stop me wanting one.
Visiting the Iron Duke
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View from the pointy end, which I’m reliably informed is called the “bow”.
We went to see HMS Iron Duke today. This is a warship that has “adopted” the city of Hull and drops by whenever it is passing, although perhaps it is a bit more complicated than that. Anyhoo, we went off to take a look round and grab some pictures. Thanks to the crew for letting a bunch of folks traipse around your decks.
I love this sign. I just worry that I don’t know what the alarm sounds like…
The Lord Mayor came to see the ship too. That’s his Jag.
Uncharted 3–Drake’s Deception
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Bought the third in the Uncharted series of video games today. I must admit I’ve not actually quite finished the second one yet. I got stuck taking on some really nasty crossbow wielding goblin thingies that were very hard to kill. But I was very close to the end.
The third instalment of “Tomb Raider with a bloke” is very much in the same vein as the previous two, but very, very well done. One of the best bits for me is that in this one you usually have a partner with you and they are actually quite useful to have around. Unlike some games, where your comrades stand around getting shot while you solve the puzzle and take out the bad guys, these folks are quite engaged and will even give you problem solving tips if you stagger around dumbly for long enough.
The locations that I’ve been to so far have all been excellent. I feel kind of guilty not taking in the beautifully rendered environments while I’m going for a headshot on the rocket launching zombie on the other side of the valley, but it all looks very nice.
The scenario with its strange maps from the past, underground tombs and “Say, do you think that statue might rotate?” moments is very like the earlier ones, but in a good way.
The stern message at the start says that you should take a break of at least 15 minutes in each hour of gameplay. But this is not a game you can really play in 45 minute chunks. Me, I keep getting dry eyes because I forget to blink during the gameplay.
If you liked the earlier ones you’ll love this. If you’ve always wanted to take part in an Indiana Jones movie, you’ll love it too.
The Best Way to Write Programs
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So, how would you represent the arrows?
The Software Development for the First Year C# Programming course this year is a game I have invented. I’ve called it Evil Squash. It even has its own web site:
The game is very like Snakes and Ladders, but with a twist that makes it a bit like Ludo as well. At the moment we are working on the player movement, which uses a board like the one above. When a player lands on the tail of an arrow they must then follow it to the destination. We have decided that there are three ways that you can implement this behaviour.
- A whole bunch of conditions that hard wires the arrows into the program
- An array with a location for each square that provides a redirection to the destination square.
- An array of “redirects” that holds the behaviour of the 10 arrows
You might want to consider which is the “best” one. To me, the answer is “you can’t say”. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Some of them use less memory, some go quicker. Some are easier to test and some are easier to understand.
One of the things that we try very hard to do in the programming course is to get people to think that often there is no “best” way to solve a problem, merely ones that are better than others against certain criteria. We give extra marks to students who manage to use arrays (I’ve nothing against hard wiring the arrows, but I thing showing you can use an array is something that should be rewarded).
Next week we are going to get the player and the “Evil Squash” behaviour sorted, on the way to making a complete game and maybe even some AI powered opponents.
I’m keeping the domain in case we get some good ones (maybe even phone based) that we might want to distribute.
Update on 2011-11-08 09:32 by Rob
One student has suggested using a Dictionary. Good idea.
Don’t Take Your iPad to Meetings
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I took my iPad to a meeting today. I do love the device to bits (although the battery life seems to have taken a bit of a hit since I upgraded it to the latest operating system) as it is a great way to consume content. Unfortunately I was reminded again of how hard it is to make good use of it to take notes. While some of those around me were confidently tapping text into their netbooks and laptops I was trying to persuade the shift key to do what I wanted and writing “auto-corrected” rubbish. If I had remembered to bring the Bluetooth keyboard to type text in things might have been easier, but as it was I ended up with a few lines of garbled text. Oh well.
Windows Phone Event at Hull University
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Microsoft are coming to Hull on Wednesday the 16th of November for some intensive Windows Phone Development action. The event will run from 1:15-5:00pm in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building. It includes an afternoon tea break, and takeaway pizza at the end.
If you want to find out how you can take your C# skills and apply them the phone, sell you applications and maybe even make some money, then you you should come along.
Spaces are limited so register on EventBrite for free here: http://hullwindowsphonecamp.eventbrite.com/
Leaves on Cottingham Road
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Went for a walk this afternoon. Took the camera. Jolly glad I did too.
Milton Jones in York
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Went to see Milton Jones at York last night. Very funny indeed. Nice to see a comedian that sees no need to be anything other than funny. Nothing nasty or rude, just out and out silly laughs. See him if you can.
October Three Thing Game Winners
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These folks are the true survivors.
[Cross posted from www.threethinggame.com/]
Well, we lost a few on the way. The effects of fatigue and the lure of Halloween parties meant that some of our teams didn’t make it to the finish line. However, a good time was had by all and I’ve never seen so much pizza eaten by so many so quickly. The pizza company had to send two cars to deliver all 40. And it all got eaten…
This morning at 7:30 Simon and I went around with a camera and got presentations from all the teams of their games. The videos will be up tomorrow so you can see for yourself how just how good they are. We had some especially impressive solutions from First Year teams who, with only five or so weeks of C# under their belt, produced some highly playable results. Then, at 9:00 sharp the three judges, Warren, Neil and Simon watched the top ten teams and picked the winners. Which was so difficult we had to award two second prizes.
Judges and videos
You’d think they’d look pleased with prizes of this quality….
This is the team that won the award for best interpretation of their Three Things. “Tactical Nuclear Penguins”, made up of
The first Second Place team, if you see what I mean, “The Double A's”.
This is the second, Second Placed, team. “I chose this weekend over Battlefield 3” , aka
The Winners, with their prizes.
The Winners were praised by the judges for producing a game for Windows Phone that was good enough to sell right now, with delightful graphics, a well honed mechanic and good adherence to the theme. And you could slice the moon in half. These guys are making a bit of a habit of winning, having nabbed the prizes in the last competition too. “The Infamous Two Sirs”,
The next Three Thing Game will be on the weekend of 17th and 18th March 2012. Start planning now.
Three Thing Game Starts
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This morning I was off up to ToysRUs first thing for the prizes. Including a speedboat….
Find out more about how things are going over at the competition site.
Whatever Happened to Flickr
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This is a bit of cautionary tale I guess. I’ve been using Flickr for many years as a host for my pictures. I found the service so good that I’ve even been paying for it. Until now. Suddenly uploads are going like treacle, the web editing doesn’t work properly and other photo sharing sites are powering ahead with innovations that make Flickr look pretty long in the tooth. Snag is, I’ve got thousands of pictures up there, many of which are linked through to my blog – like the one above of Scarborough harbour.
So, do I stick with Flickr, and hope that their parent, Yahoo, decides that it is worth investing in, or do I jump ship to another company which might go the same way in five years? The cloud is a great place to put stuff, but I think we need to remember that not all clouds stay the same forever.
Windows Phone Blue Book Available
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The Windows Phone Blue Book Mango Version is now available. This is for Version 7.5 (Mango) of the phone and 7.1 of the tools.
You can download it from here.
The file is quite big, around 130M. This is because you don't just get the book, you also get a complete course including sample code, Powerpoint decks and labs.
Important: When you unzip the files there are some quite long file paths in the sample code. This is because a Windows Phone project can have quite a few subfolders beneath it. You can avoid this problem by unzipping to somewhere quite high up the directory hierarchy on your disk, perhaps c:\WP7 for example.
Three Thing Game XNA Content
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You can find details of the XNA session that I gave today for Three Thing Game here:
Why I Need another SSD
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This kind of pattern shows why an SSD (Solid State Disk) makes a lot of sense. It is from Windows Performance Monitor. The top trace shows the CPU loading. As you can see the CPU is not doing that much, at best it is around half loaded. The bottom trace shows disk activity, which is pretty much maxed out.
I get this a lot, and I find it really annoying. I used to hate sitting waiting while the hard drive light flickered and my machine slowed down to treacle speed. Modern machines have addressed this issue by not having hard drive lights any more, but this isn’t really a good solution in my opinion.
A good solution is an SSD. It gives a huge improvement in the speed of the disk, particularly for reading files. Solid State Drives are also harder to break by dropping them, and they generally consume less power. I put one in my Alienware laptop and it really made a difference. I think I’m going to put one in my desktop too.
I reckon the best way to do this is to put all the system files on the SSD and then use an magnetic disk for all the documents. That way I still have space for all my oodles of files.
Three Thing Game Starts
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All the students, with their things.
We have started Three Thing Game October 2011. You can find out more here. You can find all the pictures here.
If you want to tweet about it, or follow the tweets, take a look at #threethinggame on Twitter.
This is the largest competition we have ever had. Good luck folks. Don’t forget the special sessions on Windows Phone and XNA development on Wednesday, starting at 2:15 pm in LTD. These sessions are open to anyone who wants to get started writing games, not just “Three Thingers”.
Printing Large
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Bought a gadget yesterday. Fancy that. And not a small thing either. A Brother MFC-J6510 printer/scanner/copier/corns cut while you wait. I’ve had “all in one” printers before but this one is a bit special because it is A3. I’ve fancied printing out large pictures for a while and this one looked a pretty good deal. Very heavy. Number one son and I were visibly wilting as we got it back to the car. Seems to work well though. Print quality is good on large paper, although I’ll have to get some proper Brother paper to get the best out of it. If was shipped with tiny ink cartridges, which means that after six or so pages I’ve got warning lights coming on, and thanks to the “Magic of Photoshop Elements” I manage to waste a page of expensive paper when it failed to print what the preview showed it would.
However, I’m very pleased with it. I was particularly impressed when I found that it is also an A3 scanner, so I can get some really big pictures and stuff into the computer easily.
If you are in the market for big printing it well worth a look. But take a friend to help carry it out of the shop…
Party Fun
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Went out tonight to an absolutely ace party. Good food, great company and folks I haven’t seen for years. Thanks to Julie and Tim for making it happen and to Dad for getting it to 80 years old so that we had an excuse to get together.
Useful DIY Tip
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I’m presently taking apart a Kinect sensor to get some pictures for a Kinect book that I’m writing (keep posted for more details). One of the problems that you have when working on these things is the way that they have tiny screws that need to be put back into tiny, and hard to get to, places. So to solve this I used my old “Blu-Tac” screwdriver technique (other sticky fixer solutions are available).
You can use a tiny blob of “Blu-Tac” to stick the screw to the end of the screwdriver. Then it is as easy as pie to put the screw back in the hole. You can also use this technique if you don’t want the screw to fall into the device when you have removed it. And it also works when you take glasses to bits and don’t want to lose those really tiny screws.
Smart Students
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We have some very smart students. In C# we are considering problems you can have with conditions if you are checking for valid entries, for example:
if ( flimNo < 1 && filmNo > 5 )
{
// unlikely we will get here
}
else
{// funny how this part always gets obeyed...
}
I made the point that a number which is less than one and greater than five is pretty much impossible. Quick as a flash, one of our First Years said “Root 36”. Which can be -6 or 6.
FYI, what you really want if you want to reject invalid entries is to change that && (and) to || (or).
if ( flimNo < 1 || filmNo > 5 )
{
// film number is invalid
}
else
{
// film number is valid
}
Finding Things
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Now that we have the teams we need some things. I’ve spent a chunk of the day (not a very large one admittedly) working on things to give the teams. There were some great suggestions on the web site, I’ve added a few more of my own. My favourite so far “with a banjo”.
Be very afraid.
robmiles.com
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
