Windows 10 + Three Thing Game GameJam Starts

The GameJam started promptly today at 10:00 am. By 10:30 most of the teams had turned up and signed in. All things considered, what with it being the last two days of the semester, we had a pretty good turnout. Plenty of teams and plenty of things, courtesy of the Thingomatic. Which worked fine, although it was a bit hungry on the battery side.

Before we started coding we had talks from Lee Stott (Windows 10), Nick Smith (Marmalade) and Dean Ellis (MonoGame). And then, after lunch Simon Jackson gave a talk about Unity. Great stuff, turning the event into a mini-conference as well as a hackathon.

The serious development started in the afternoon. We had the run of our large computer lab, which had been specially re-imaged with Windows 10 just for the event.

This is the team from Hull College who were using the cross platform abilities of Windows 10 to deploy a game across desktop, phone and Raspberry Pi. And it worked too. I took lots more pictures of the event. You can find them here.

Of course we had pizza. And of course there was plenty.

One of the prizes is an "Xbox Onsie". David and Simon couldn't resist putting them on and modelling them...

When I left everyone was settling down for the night. My plan was to come back early and get cracking on my game....

Thingomatic Box

We need the finished "Thingomatic" for the Windows 10 GameJam tomorrow. So of course today I'm finishing off the box. I've designed it in the usual way, a Python program that runs inside FreeCad and drops out the designs. I can print pretty much anything this way.

Especially if it is rectangular.

Mystery Picture

I like taking abstract pictures. I took this on the way to work. Can anyone tell me what it is?

Three Thing Game Thingomatic Lives

We are holding a Windows 10 gaming event at the end of this week. It's going to be a Three Thing Game, which is great, but we aren't going to have an auction for the things this time. 

For this competition we will be using the newly created Thingomatic (patent pending). You can see it above. It is an Arduino linked to a tiny associative word database that I got from those awfully nice people at Akafugu. You just press a button and you get three four letter things that are related in some way. I'm going to let each team press the button three times and pick the best three things from what comes up. Should be fun.

And by Thursday I might even have printed a box for it. 

If you are coming to the event, it all starts at 10:00 am on Thursday 11th in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building on the Hull University campus. We will be having introduction sessions there, prior to moving to the Fenner computer suite for the actual development. 

It's going to be great fun. 

Go to East Park

Hull East Park is wonderful. They have water features, a café and a tiny zoo. And today they had an event with a fairground, steam engines and classic cars. We went along for the morning and of course I took a camera. And a few lenses. 

If you're at a loose end at a weekend and the weather is nice you really ought to go and take a look. 

Funfair or not.

Splatoon Rocks

I'm not worried about the future of Nintendo. Not when they keep putting out video games of this quality. Splatoon is kind of hard to explain. You wonder if they started with the name and built it from there, or if a programmer came along and said "I've just written this great bit of code that lets you lay paint down on scenery....". Either way the game rocks.

Each player is part kid, part squid. You can play on your own, or as part of a team aiming to paint the town red (or whatever colour you've been assigned). When you change into squid mode you can move quickly through paint of your own colour. So you can spray the floors and walls in front of you and then zoom through it. You can use your "squiddiness" to go under barriers too. And of course your paint gun is pretty fatal to players shooting a different colour.

The rounds are timed and the player who has covered the most territory wins. There are some splendid weapons, including a paint roller that is horribly effective at close range. There's a story mode and lots of challenges too.

I must come clean at this point, I've not actually played it. But I watched the rest of the family having a go and much fun was had. You can do a two player mode, but you'll need some joypad like controllers, it won't work with just a second Wii controller. We used a classic controller and that worked fine.

Apparently the game works really well in network multiplayer too.

C# Yellow Book in Korean

The C# Yellow Book is going worldwide, which is wonderful. I've just agreed to the publication of a Korean version. I got an email a while back from an agent and we a presently drawing up the contracts to get it translated and into the shops.

I've only been to Korea once, I spent a week or so in Seoul as part of the 2007 Imagine Cup World Finals. It is a wonderful place. I'd go back there in a heartbeat.

I really hope I can get hold of a printed copy when it is ready. I'd love to be able to point at it on the bookshelf and say "I wrote that....".

If you are happy with an English version you can get a copy, along with a complete undergraduate course, from here:

http://www.csharpcourse.com/

I am not always me

You know those scary moments that you have every now and then, when the world seems to wobble slightly on its axis and you fret that horrible things are happening that you are only just becoming aware of? 

Well, just had one of those. On Tuesday, just as I was limbering up to do my talk at the Institute of Physics, I got an email from booking.com congratulating me for making a booking I hadn't made. Oh dear.

I'm not that happy with Booking.com to be honest. Last year I used them to book a few days in a Swansea guest house. It was very nice and all, but the company is now convinced that Swansea is the only place I want to go in the world, and keep sending me what they think are enticing offers to stay in the area again. And they keep telling me that "I've unlocked another discount". I haven't. I've just not used the company for a while. And it is likely to stay that way.

Unlike someone with a similar name to mine, who has just made a booking using my email address. I got the "click here to confirm it is you" message (which conspicuously lacks anywhere you can click to confirm it isn't you). I sent an email off to customer support and got nothing back. Except more emails about few places that my namesake might like to visit. Near Swansea as it turns out.

I've just got an email from booking.com addressed to my namesake, asking me to rate my recent interaction with a customer support person. Oh well. That has to count as progress I suppose.

Hull Windows 10 Three Thing Game - Still Time to Register

The event is filling up nicely, but we still have room for a few more folks if you want to come along. The labs are being imaged, the things are being polished and it all starts next Thursday.

If you've registered we'll have "Things on the Day" for you to base your game on, or you can have your things next Monday. Keep an eye on your mailbox for details of the all important "Thing Picking" process.

If you are in Hull next Thursday-Friday (11th and 12th of June) then you really should come along. We've got Microsoft, MonoGame and Marmalade coming along. And Unity, which doesn't begin with M, but we are giving it a free pass this time. And it is Middleware, so I guess that counts.

Anyhoo, you can find out the precise programme and sign up here:

http://www.threethinggame.com/

Remember, this is a special event in that you don't have to be a Hull student to come along (although you'll be most welcome if you do). Any local developer, or out-of-town folks who want to come along and play with Windows 10 game making can come along. And we'll have free pizza. As in PIZZA THAT IS FREE.

Talking Teaching at the Institute of Physics

One of my slides....

I went to Sheffield today. It's a nice enough train ride, straight from Cottingham. Even nicer when you have company (thanks to David and Emily for being in the right place at the right time).

The reason for the trip was a meeting entitled "Developments in Teaching Physics Students Computer Programming Skills", which had been organised by the Institute of Physics Higher Education Group. They'd asked me along to talk about my experiences teaching programming. Turns out I can do that.....

It was a really interesting day. Physics is a fantastic subject. And work in the field is greatly aided by a bit of programming expertise. There was considerable discussion about whether the expertise should be given in a programming language (for example Python) or using one of the popular lab packages such as LabView. Or perhaps a tool such as MatLab or Mathematica? Or you could just do things in Excel. Much to think about here...

I gave a little talk about the importance of the practical side of things, with emphasis on professional elements. I also mentioned a little framework I'm working on to help things along (of which much more real soon).

Everyone was really concerned to make sure that the skills taught were appropriate and useful, and given in a proper physics context. I think that in this company I'm more of a "means" person, with a focus on the process of producing a quality solution, where as the Physics folks are much more "ends" types, who see computing as a small component in a much larger picture.

Ether way it was a very useful and thought provoking meeting of minds.

Reading "Forbidden" Web Pages with C#

In my session at Techdays last week I was showing how to make an asynchronous method that reads a web page. I was bemoaning the way that my method worked for www.bbc.co.uk but not for the wonderful site that is www.robmiles.com. When I try to read "my" page the request fails with a "403 Forbidden error".

Well, many thanks to Erik van Telgen, René Vermijs and @HenroOnline who all came back with the answer. Turns out that, unlike the liberal BBC, my blog host insists that that any read requests come from browsers, not programs. Fortunately it is easy to modify the web request to appear to be from a browser, and so get the Html back.

public async Task<string> GetPageAsStringAsync(string url)
{
    HttpClient x = new HttpClient();
    x.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("user-agent", 
        "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0)");
    HttpResponseMessage response = await x.GetAsync(url);
    string content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
    return content;
}

This version of "GetPageAsStringAsync" returns the contents of a page and impersonates a browser when it does it.

string site = await GetPageAsString(@"http://www.robmiles.com");

It's very easy to use, as you can see above. And this works perfectly. Many thanks for your help folks.

I really hope that I get invited back to Techdays next year, I'm sure by then I'll have another bunch of technical problems I can get help with...

Eye Test

Coming soon to a face near me...

So, I went for an eye test yesterday. Cue all the eye test jokes.

"Tell me sir, have your eyes ever been checked?"
"No, they've always been blue."

"Can you see that eye-test on the wall?"
"What wall?"

etc etc

Anyhoo, I was pleased to find out that my eyes haven't changed that much since last time. I've had my present specs for quite a few years. A year and a half ago a bit fell off and I made a "temporary" repair using heat shrink tubing that has been a bit less temporary than I intended.

This time I've just gone for a single pair of glasses. No messing around with "two for one" deals. Experiments have shown that I can't wear two pairs of glasses at the same time, and that I'll probably lose the second pair anyway. They should arrive in a couple of weeks. Rather excited.

Plane Rainbow

As we were in the shuttle bus out to the plane to fly back last night there was the most amazing rainbow over the airport. When we got off to head into the plane I threw all my bags down on the concrete, grabbed the camera and took a few shots.  I'm quite pleased with the composition, although it really had nothing at all to do with me, and everything to do with dumb luck.

TechDays Sessions Fun

First Great Audience for the Universal Application Session

I don't know what it is about audiences from the Netherlands. But they are around the best in the world. Up for anything, attentive and just generally fantastic.

Await and Async audience

Both sessions seemed to go really well (at least most of the jokes got appropriate laughs or groans). I've passed the slides and demo programs over to the conference folks and they should be available soon. I'll post them here on the blog (with a bit of extra howto stuff) next week as well.

Thanks to the Techdays crew for inviting me. I was in the Hague for just about 24 hours, but they were lovely...

Flying to TechDays

Flew out to Techdays today. The weather was nice and now I'm allowed to use my phone all the way through the flight I did just that. This was the view from the plane as we flew over the UK coastline.

My sessions are tomorrow, but tonight we had a dinner in the Speaker's Lounge which was great. I was able to catch up with lots of folks I've not seen for a while. Good to see you all again.

The bags the are giving the delegates this year are really nice, and the speakers get one each too. And the speakers lounge has some very groovy furniture.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Over last weekend we went to see Mad Max: Fury Road.  Wow.

It is as if the director had watched every Michael Bay Transformers movie and then decided that he could go to around 11 or 12 on that scale. Or more. The action is relentless, violent and in some parts a bit queasy making (at least for wimpy old me).

Tom Hardy does a great job as Max. Not that he has to say much. I think they gave him his script written on the back of a cigarette packet. Charlize Theron is great in the film as well. She has lines and everything. All the souls in the movie are tortured, torturing or both.

If you like your action fast moving and with lots of spectacle then you'll love it. If you prefer films where the most action packed thing that happens is that Lady Faversham comes to visit and they can't find the best tablecloth, then you might want to give it a miss.

TechDays Writing

Spent a big chunk of today writing content for TechDays later this week. I'm giving two sessions. Rather looking forward to it.

The over eager dog that is Lightroom

Some software drives me nuts. The kind I'm thinking about is the stuff that is useful enough to be indispensable, but actually really annoying to use sometimes.

Such as Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom is a fantastically useful program for managing your photos. If you are a serious photographer, you use Lightroom. It's that simple. I only started using it a few years ago, but it has transformed the way that I work with images. And just about all for the better.

Unfortunately though, it has a few problems. Sometimes it is a like a big, helpful, over-eager dog that is always trying to do the best for you. And most of the time it succeeds. But sometimes it does insane things.

Take, for example, importing pictures.  This should be easy. Find the folder where the pictures are, and then copy in all the ones that aren't in the catalogue.

Except that whenever you click on (or perhaps even wave the mouse near) a folder at the start of an import Lightroom insists on running off and seeking out all the images in that location. In the entire directory hierarchy. Even though there is absolutely no need to do this.

And it always thinks I want to import from the SD card that I keep plugged into the Surface. So when I start importing it proudly displays a whole bunch of clipart I'm never going to want to look at.

What I'd love is for someone to come back to me and tell me that there are magical options that can be used to turn off this rather daft behaviour. Any ideas folks?

Batmobile

They had this Car Expo in Bristol today. Including a version of I think one of the best Batmobiles.

No Photographs

I carted a camera all around Bristol today without taking a single photograph. Never mind, here's a picture of Hull centre instead...