Three Thing Game Day 1

This is the traditional “before” shot. We’ll see how many people are still smiling when we get to “after”.

Three Thing Game is something of an institution at our institution. If you see what I mean. Every one is slightly different, but all of them are a bit bonkers, in the nicest possible way. Some things stay the same: Three Things to base the game on, Four students in a team, 24 hours overnight to deliver.. but we like to ring the odd change here and there. The last couple of events we’ve held auctions for the “things” that will be the basis of the games. Next time, who knows.

Anyhoo, we started today at 11:00 with “masses’o’hardware” turning up in the Fenner Lab, along with loads of “keen to go through the mill” students. There is always a frantic couple of hours while things settle down, network addresses are assigned and multiple monitors adjusted appropriately. This time we also had expertise in the form of Dave Brown and Lee Stott from Microsoft and Dean Ellis and Dominique Louis from the Monogame team. I did a quick XNA lecture early in the afternoon and then the Microsoft and Monogame team took centre stage to describe the opportunities coming over the horizon with Windows 8 and MonoGame.

Apparently last week Microsoft launched a new operating system. I was quite surprised to find this out, you’d have thought there would have been something about it in the papers…. All joking aside (ho ho) I’ve been using Windows 8 for a while now. I’ve found it stable, useful and remarkably like Windows 7. It has changed the way I work for the better. Programs are now launched in seconds with a few key presses, rather than a hunt through folders. I’ve used the Metro style user interface a bit, but I really want to see it on a platform it was built for (for example Surface).

Anyhoo, the rules of the game for Windows 8 applications have changed. Good News: You can now sell applications for Windows 8 just like you can for Windows Phone. Bad News: The Windows 8 Metro Style user interface does not encompass the XNA that we know and love. Better News: You can use MonoGame, to create XNA applications that are Windows 8 Store compliant. Even Better News: MonoGame versions of your program can also be ported onto Android, iPhone, PS Vita and even the Raspberry Pi (coming soon).

Lee from Microsoft set out how Windows 8 can make your programs more interesting and marketable and then Dean and Dominique showed how easy it is to port an existing XNA game to the MonoGame framework. If you are an XNA developer you must, must, must, be looking at MonoGame. I reckon it is the future of XNA, and I’m jolly pleased to see it there, in such good health.

Once we’d had the presentations the development got going in earnest. I of course staggered around with the big camera and took a whole bunch of pictures which have found their way on to Flickr if you want to see all of them.

These guys are “Haribo Hardened”….

That should be enough keyboards...

These guys are so reading the right books...

None of these smiles are forced. For sure.

Lee and the Microsoft crew getting down with the Sheergame team.

We ordered 45 pizzas. And they all got eaten.

I staggered home around 10:45 leaving Martin and Simon to run the night shift. Judging tomorrow morning. Looking forward to it.

Three Thing Game Prep

The picture is nothing much to do with Three Thing Game, but it is rather a nice one.

I spent half an hour today (and pretty much my entire photocopying allowance) printing out briefing documents and marking sheets for Three Thing Game tomorrow and Sunday. I’m not sure about much else, but we aren’t going to be short of paperwork…..

Space Cheese Battle is Coming

Just spent some time this evening making this. It’s the game board that we will be using for the course work this year on the programming course…..

How Things are

We’ve had our final auction of this Three Thing Game. After a lot (and I mean a lot) of money changed hands the final thing mapping as as follows.

Team Name	Thing1	Thing2	Thing3
A Druish Princess	Invading	Marvel	wearing glasses
Aint no partly like a kambham-party	Steaming	Spam	copyright infringement
Beta Jester	Tron	Speed	attack
Battle Brothers	Something beginning with P	Ship	Spoon
Brayshawshank-Redemption	Pink	Nuts	In the rain
BRB	Snowing	Spendthrift	Banker
C Hash	Keyboard cat	Vampire	at midnight
Chicken Dippers	Chicken	Hamster	Parade
COMPUTER SCIENCE FC	Ghost	Yoghurt	Gangnam Style
Did you mean "Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?"	Fighting	Toast	Party
Double Jump	Atomic	Bath Sponge	Raider
Fresh Pot	Shark	Saxaphone	At the Zoo
Honeybadger Productions	Ninja	Mountains	Defence
Left 4 Dev	Cooking	Neon	Apocalypse
LightMass	Evil Wizard	Cricket Bat	in the graveyard
M.C.S.	Camel	Bus Stop	Werewolf
Men On A Mission	Sneaky	Assassin	With a moustache
Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway	Poptart	Deoderant	Teddy Bear
Mr. Parse	Jelly	Orchestra	Four Letter Word
Mulan	Daft Punk	Rhymes with Truck	Pinball
No Method(), No Class{}	Caffeine	Monkey	under attack
Pigs Might Fly	Pirates	Duvet	racer
QWERTYUIOP	Lion	Skeleton	Swimming
Red Light:Green Light	Heroine	Nick Cage	wearing a tutu
Rusty Spoons	Roman	Motorboat	Pig
Sheerware Games	Flying	Bombs	Tank
SkyNet	Bungling	Bread	Pie
TBC	Zombie	Butler	Swimming Pool
Team HAL 9000	Dragon	Spider	goes fishing
Team Plan B	Gazebo	Javelin	word processor
Team Titans	Lonely	Robots	find love
The C Hashes	clone	Vampire	Apocalypse
The Compilers	Underwater	Atom Bomb	bike ride
The Cosmic Corn Snacks	Students	Bishop	assault
The Infamous Two Sirs	Goldfish	Plug hole	Invasion
The Runners Up	Grunting	Spring	Light cycles
The Y-Nots!	Fruitcake	Banana	temptress
Three Men	Lightning	Kung Fu	plays piano
Three Game'o'holics	Fighting	Desk	In a Dress

I think my favourite has got to be “Ghost Yoghurt Gangnam Style”. Can’t wait to see the game.

Writin’ Skilz R Important

If I had one piece of advice for a Computer Science student I think it would be nothing to do with programming. Or even computers. It would simply be “Learn to write well”. This doesn’t mean I necessarily want to see short stories, or poems (although send them through if you like), it just means that the art of putting words our there that make sense is something you should work at.

In my experience the only way to get good at writing is to write a lot. Then write some more. Blogs are great for this, as are diaries. And Final Year Projects. Just set yourself the task of knocking out a few words a day and putting them somewhere where others can find and comment on them. Try writing in other styles, from the dry “It can be shown that” kind of report style to anything else you like, including murder mystery if you fancy having a go. And get used to revising your text after you have read it. Just because there are no wavy red lines on the page doesn’t mean it actually makes sense. Watch for repeated phrases that repeat themselves repeatedly. Try to find alternatives to make the text sound better.  A good tip is to read out loud what you have just written. Anything that is not quite right will really sound  that way.

Another tip is to read stuff by people who can write well. The BBC news site is pretty good for this, along with newspaper sites like the Times and the Guardian.

I’m not saying that Computer Scientists are now doing an English degree. What I’m really saying is that if you can express yourself in written words, this will pay off big time when you go for jobs.

So Many Things. So Little Time.

What 20,000 pounds actually looks like. Of course you can't spend it in the shops...

Teams and their Two Things

We had our Thing Auction today. Last year we just managed to get through all the lots in the time that we had. This year we had more teams and just didn't make it. There was a time when I thought that we would get everything done, then a couple of mammoth bidding wars put us a bit behind schedule.

Never mind. We plan to run the "Third Thing Auction" just before the Rather Useful Seminar on Wednesday. That's at 1:15 pm in LTD on the Third Floor of the Robert Blackburn Building. The lecture is all about preparing for Three Thing Game, so it seems rather appropriate.

If any team really can't wait until then to get their hands on a thing, they can contact me and I'll dig one out for them.

It was fun though. The sound the crowd made when the thing "Keyboard cat" came out was wonderful.

Sunday Printing

I’m getting the hang of 3D printing now. I started off thinking that I would be using it to print cases for gadgets. I am doing that, but now I’m just printing out things that I find pleasing. Like the “Heart Gears” above from Thingiverse. I’ve been busy today writing quiz questions and auction stuff for Three Thing Game and in the background Una the Ultimaker has been turning out the parts above. It is a design that we saw at the exhibition yesterday and I really like it.

I’m not completely happy with the results (that will never happen) but on the whole I think it works well. The gears turn and the object turns into and out of a heart shape. I need to adjust the flow and layers slightly to get rid the gaps in the surfaces above.

3D Print Show

The wristband of power. And a Lego watch

Another reason to go to London, apart from the Augmented Reality event yesterday, was to drop in on the 3D Printshow that was taking place in London this weekend. Ultimaker, the company that made my 3D printer, were there and I wanted to drop by and see how they were doing. I also wanted to see what was going on in this area. The answer is rather a lot. We arrived before the show opened, but there was already quite a queue snaking around the courtyard waiting to get in. Fortunately we weren’t waiting long and soon we were inside marvelling at the way this technology is moving forward. And boy, is it moving. I counted five 3D printers I’d never seen before, all printing away merrily in front of throngs of fascinated folks. Autodesk were there too, along with lots of other companies, some I’d heard of, some not.

The folks at Sculpteo will take your designs and make them. You can even design your artefacts on their web page.

They can even print in colour, and the quality is lovely.

There were some lovely examples of printing

This is a great piece of art. The heights of the keys show the popularity of the web sites behind them.

This was a very clever piece of 3D art. The cylindrical mirror in the middle shows a perfect image of a hand, reflecting the seriously distorted sculpture.

They had a band, and of course all their instruments had been printed…

At the Ultimaker stand they had a seriously impressive dual extruder printer which had turned out some incredible prints.  

One major bonus was these folks being at the show. Formlabs might just have the future of 3D printing in their hands. They’ve built a 3D printer that uses an optical technology and special syrup that solidifies under UV light. The resolution is streets ahead of anything comparable at the price. Only snag I can see is that the raw material is a bit pricey, at 130 dollars a litre, but with a bit of luck this will drop over time. Some of the things they had printed were astonishingly good and because there is no messing around with hot and sticky plastic, their printer has a good chance of making it as an appliance.

There were lots of people selling ready made printers and claiming that they have a device for the mass market. I’m not convinced of this. I’d love to be proved wrong, but for now I still see it as a tinkerer’s toy. Ultimaker sell their machines as kits and I think that this is actually quite an honest thing to do. Once you have built the machine you end up with a pretty solid understanding of how it works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. And I reckon all the current crop of printers will go wrong I’m afraid. In a few years time, when the technology has settled down, maybe we will see it in the home, From the interest that I saw at the show, this is just a matter of time.

Creating Augmented Reality in Education

Audience shot. Thanks for being a super bunch.

I was up bright and early today. Well, early anyway. The taxi was picking me up at 5:45 to get me to the station for a train ride to London. I was giving a session at the “Creating Augmented Reality in Education” event. By 5:55 the taxi had still not turned up and a panic phone call to the company revealed that the driver was out there in the mist looking for my house. So, I told him where we could meet up and then, pausing only to step in a deep puddle, fill my shoes with muddy water and say a rude word loudly for the whole of the street to wake up to, I headed for the cab.

We made it to the train with minutes to spare and I got there just in time for the first session. There was a great range of stuff, from descriptions of work in Health Training to eye popping demos of flying dragons and Mars Rovers to thought provoking discussion of just how this stuff is going to change the way we interact with computers and also the world around us. The consensus would seem to be that the stuff is coming, it will change our lives, but we don’t quite know how yet. Perhaps our kids will tell us. The sessions were videoed and should be available at some point. Well worth a look.

I did a session on how the Kinect sensor works, and how the data it produces can be used to get interesting behaviours and applications. My finest moment was asking the chap at the back why he was waving a piece of card with the number “3” printed on it. “Because you have 3 minutes left” was the rather sensible reply.

Anyhoo, all the demos worked, and my shoes and socks dried up fine. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. You can find a more detailed presentation with code descriptions, along with the demo code, here.

Biggest. Three. Thing. Game. Ever.

I spent tonight entering all the names of the teams into the master spread sheet and sending out the “welcome” emails. If you are in a team you should have heard from me. Turns out that we have 40 teams signed up and around 120 students taking part.

Going to be huge pizza order on Saturday Night……

3D Printing at the Rather Useful Seminar

Una getting star billing

Some time back I rather rashly promised to bring my 3D printer in for a Rather Useful Seminar. Well, today was that day. The weather was horrible. Just the kind of torrential downpour in which you want to carry your high precision printing device. Partly made of wood.

Anyhoo, thanks to help from Adam, a blue Ikea carrier bag (just about a perfect fit) and a big bin liner I managed to get Una the Ultimaker into the lecture theatre and so I started the seminar. As usual I’d prepared a slide deck and so I stated working through the background to 3D printing, talking about the different technologies and how they worked. Then I glanced at the audience. Nobody was looking at me. They were all staring transfixed at Una, who was sitting on the bench doing nothing.

So, that was that. It was straight over to the PC, draw something in Sketchup (a really great, free program), export it to an STL file, slice it with Cura and then get Una printing.

People love watching 3D printers do their stuff. In a world where pretty much everything has been made “Ho Hum” by technology there is something rather magical about a device that makes something appear from nothing. Una behaved herself very well. Once she’d printed the silly design I’d made in Sketchup we went on to print a tiny rocket, and she handled that with aplomb. Then it was back into the bag for the trip home. I’ve just unpacked her and she seems none the worse for the trip out.

I really like this device. It is well thought out and works a treat. And everyone seemed to really enjoy seeing her in action. I’ve put my slides on the Rather Useful Seminars site, but you would probably learn more by just searching YouTube for videos of Ultimakers…

Phone Home

A student brought me a mobile phone which they found in the lecture today. It was an Android device with a lock screen. I couldn’t do much with it, so I just took it home and waited for it to ring. The first few seconds of the call were interesting as I was a bit worried that the caller might think they were talking to a phone thief and that outside a SWAT team were waiting to burst through the door, spray the room with bullets and prise the phone from my dead and broken fingers.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Person of Interest.

Anyhoo, names were exchanged and with a bit of luck they’ll get their phone back tomorrow. One way we could have avoided this would be if the owner had put contact details on their lock screen, so that I would have known who to call. This is not hard to do but it is fiddly, because you have to edit the background image and add the text, and if you change the background picture you have to do it all again.

Of course if it had been a Windows Phone they could have just installed the Lost Phone app on their device, which does all the hard work for them.

This is also a very interesting application because the author, Scott Hanselman, wrote version 1.0 in six hours and also produced a really good blog post about the process and described some good practice when you are writing Windows Phone applications.

Update on 2012-10-17 19:25 by Rob

The owner dropped by and picked their phone up this morning. And then (and this is the spooky bit) someone left their wallet in another lecture, which I had to get back to them. Not had anything handed in for years, and now two in two days.

I wonder what I'll get tomorrow. I'm hoping for some keys to a Ferrari.

Buying Hardware

Building the PiArcade table is turning out to be quite fun. It is also giving me an excuse to go out and buy some more tools. Yesterday we went down to ToolStation for some bits and bobs as James had mentioned that their prices are very good.

They are. Their stuff is a lot cheaper than places like B and Q (does anyone actually know what the B and the Q stand for?). The only real problem is that you can’t just wander down their aisles looking at stuff to buy, instead you have to dig out all the part numbers and then write them down. But if you are after some no frills hardware they are worth a look.

PiArcade Table Progress and Compromise

Did some more work on the PiArcade table today. I’ve got the right hand joystick all fitted and working, along with the buttons. I’ve also made the holes that will allow the monitor cable to be fitted in the back and I’ve made my first major compromise. You can see it in the form of the four shiny screws that hold the joystick in place above.

I was going to implement a strict “no screws on the top” policy because I reckoned it would look a lot cleaner. But it would have meant a fair bit of extra fiddling, and might have resulted in a joystick that was not as firmly anchored as the one above. So I compromised. I can always paint the screws black, or put a bezel over the top, or just decide not to worry about it.

The only snag that I’ve hit today is that the wires to the second joystick aren’t quite long enough to reach across the table, but a few minutes with a terminal block or two should sort this out.

Campus Open Day (again)

 

We had our second autumn open day today. The weather started a bit grey, but it soon brightened up a bit and by the time I left the campus the place was looking very shiny. Two great audiences, thanks to everyone for coming to see us. I mentioned some links in my talk. Here they are if you didn’t get to note them down at the time.

Hull CompSci blog: http://hullcompsciblogs.com/

C# Yellow Book download: http://www.csharpcourse.com/

Departmental Website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/computer_science.aspx

Where Would You Think: http://www.wherewouldyouthink.com/

My blog: /

New Embedded Stuff

There are quite a few new embedded toys that I’ve discovered just recently. Here are three.

First up is the DAGU racer. This is a neat little Bluetooth controlled racing car. They’ve got it on discount at RoboSavvy at the moment. It comes with an Android app that you can use to control it, but they also expose the Bluetooth command set so that you can control it from anything, including Gadgeteer I reckon. It is powered by a tiny lithium ion battery and even comes with a set of stickers you can use to customise the racer. And for under twenty quid it was very tempting. So I got one.

I got all excited when I first found out about the Electric Imp. This is a wireless embedded device that fits into an SD card socket. You can’t actually use it as a memory card but you can use it to control a connected net appliance. And you can get it for around twenty quid. My excitement dissipated quite a lot though when I discovered that every device is bound to the imp cloud service which is where it registers its data and where messages come from.

I’ve bought these kinds of devices before, my Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit worked in a similar way. The idea of the company behind them is usually that they don’t make much money on the devices themselves, but build a subscription model which lets them pay for the infrastructure by getting cash somehow from the users of each device. Snag is, if that doesn’t work and the company goes bust you are left with a paperweight.The folks behind the imp seem quite confident that they can make it work, and the service is free at the moment. But they are talking about $50 subscriptions for business users and stuff like that, so I think I’ll pass on this, amazing as it is.

Now this I really do like. It brings you the best of the .NET Micro Framework, Arduino and Gadgeteer in a single board that costs less than thirty quid. You can feed it five volts and it just works. You’ve got an Arduino shield, three Gadgeteer ports, SD card, USB client and host and a space to put an Xbee or WiFi receiver. I’ve been looking at very simple devices that I’d like to make using the Gadgeteer and wanting a cheap, simple board that just gets things done. The FEZ Cerbuino Bee seems to fit that bill perfectly. For less than the price of a video game you get a device you can program with .NET, connect lots of Gadgeteer devices to and put onto WiFi at a bearable cost.

If you are learning C# and want to dip your toes into embedded development I can’t think of a better start. Lovely.

No Gas

At least we have electricity

Came home tonight to no gas. Which in my case (gas central heating) means cold house. A water leak had somehow got into the gas supply and as a result it had shut down.  They are having to dig up the road to find out where the problem is and we’ve turned on the PS3 and are watching Fringe to try and warm up.

Fringe is absolutely top notch telly. Where else do you get lines of dialogue like “So why do you think shape shifting soldiers from a parallel universe are stealing frozen heads?”. Why indeed?

Update on 2012-10-14 08:14 by Rob

We got our gas back at 8:00 on Friday.

Pi Arcade Joystick Interfacing

I’m trying to get the entire department working on my Raspberry Pi powered gaming table. After sterling work by Peter on the cabinet, today it was the turn of James to lend a hand with the button and joystick interfacing. The kit that I’ve bought comes with a USB to button interface (you can see it at the bottom left of the above picture). all we had to do was wire the right buttons and switches to the pins on the interface, connect it to the Raspberry Pi and then remap the controls in the software to use the right switches. And the amazing thing is that we did just that.

By the end of the day we had an arcade game running and the only problem left to solve is getting the sound output to work. At the moment the Pi is putting the sound down the HDMI cable. We need to change this over to the 3.5mm jack socket and then I can get some amplified speakers connected.  At this rate it should be finished well before Christmas….

Hull College Come to See Us

Please note that this is not all of Hull College, just the ones that came to see us.

I did one of my “well planned” sessions today. Well planned right up to the point that I found that it wasn’t where I thought it was (Two Lecture Theatre A’s on the same campus? Who’d have thought?) and that the place where it really was has a video project that doesn’t work with my lovely tablet.

Fortunately Martin was there to save my bacon and do his bit before I did my bit, so I had time to go get the less lovely, but actually working, laptop. And I got some laughs, which is always nice. Especially if they are in the places I’m expecting…..

Three Thing Game October 2012

I took this picture at the last Three Thing Game during Platform Expo, when we had Imperial  Stormtroopers wandering around the campus, and even going shopping with the kids.

Anyhoo, the time for Three Thing Game is nigh again. We’ll be dishing out the things and getting people writing games in the week from 22nd to 28th of October. Teams of up to 4 students from Hull can sign up and take part. We’ll be having our “Thing Auction” on Monday, where teams can bid for “things” to base their games on. There might even be a special prize for the team with the “Most Valuable Thing”.

Once the things have been awarded, then the development starts. We’ll be running a Rather Useful Seminar on XNA game development in C# for those who are just getting started, and then on Saturday and Sunday, during the 24 hour “crunch development”  we’ll have experts from the MonoGame team showing us how to get our XNA games ported onto Windows 8 and maybe even into Windows Store.

The judging will be on Sunday 28th, when you get to see what everyone else has managed to produce. There will be prizes and, of course, great honour for the winners... Find out how to sign up and learn more about the competition at www.threethinggame.com