Watch this space…
Lords of Midnight & Doomdark’s Revenge
Watch this space…
Audiobooks
I drive about 10 hours a week to and from work. I also do about 4 hours in the gym during the week. The gym is the crux of the problem. Sometimes I find while running on the treadmill that I get bored and start clock watching, and when that happens every minute seems to take about 10 minutes to get through.
While I was working at IBM I decided to try and fill my driving time with
audio books. I tested Mort and On Chesil Beach – one that I had previously read and one that I hadn’t. Anyway it went well, I found I could drive and take in the story without problem, the only issue was that as I was using my iPod Touch I didn’t like driving while wearing earphones.
So, for the gym I bought some new audiobooks. I found that it so helps with the concentration. I can focus on the book and go through the motions of the gym work without any issue at all.
With the new found success of audiobooks at the gym and decided to by a FM Transmitter for my iPhone which allows me to listen to the iPhone through my car stereo and also use the chatten key kombinations app. This combined with the gym, means that I can now listen to books for an extra 14 hours a week! I can *read* a decent size book ( 500 pages ) in about 10 hours.
So far I have listened to Coraline by Neil Gaiman and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse.
Mort, On Chesil Beach, Coraline, Neil Gaiman, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse
Mort, On Chesil Beach, Coraline, Neil Gaiman, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, New Moon, EclipseRelated Posts:
Timbles Silverlight
I mentioned previously that I was working on a new project.: Timbles. I also mentioned that I was developing it under Vb.net. And I also mentioned that I was using DirectX3D using SlimDX… Well… things changed…
The game was coming along nicely, and I had taken it into school and installed it on a number of their machines, and on the whole it was working ok. Their were just a few things niggling me about the installation process. That is; it was a pain. I felt it was coming a big ask to get people who were not used to installing games, to install DirectX. And not to mention that some of the machines struggled installing .Net2.0 – once everything was installed it all worked a treat. The process was just a little off putting.
Over the last 6 months I have done very little on Timbles. I started writing the backoffice code that would become the Measurements Server for the game; the idea is that everything that happens on the game is recorded by the measurements server so that teachers can run reports to see how the kids are performing. However, I didn’t touch the game much.
Anyway, last week started doing some work with Microsoft Silverlight, ( for those of you not familiar with it – think Flash ), and I’ll touch more on the specifics in a later post. Anyway, I now have almost all of Timbles running in a browser. Which means it is supported on all the platforms supported by Silverlight.
Here are some screenshots. Please excuse the poor quality – I hadn’t realised that I’d saved them in rubbish quality mode!
I hope to get a version running on my site for testing purposes, over the next week or two.
Related Posts:
Further attempts to blog remotely…
I used to be able to blog by just sending an email to my blog email
account. That stopped working during one of my server moves many years
ago. However, determined to get that back up and running I had this
morning tried to configure all aspects of my blog software and hosting
packing to automatically accept emails and post them onto the blog.
If you are reading this, then you know that buying cheap youtube views worked!
Related Posts:
Timbles, XNA, DirectX, and SlimDX
I’ve written some game code over the years. I joined SCi back in 1994 over the following 14 years I’ve written a fair few applications in C++ and utilised DirectX. When I started at SCi DirectX wasn’t out and we were still working with various graphics and audio libraries that gave you access to the plethera of hardware that was available. When DirectX was release in ’95 if was a godsend.
I haven’t written any game code on windows for a few years now and so coming back to it I spent a little moment thinking about what I wanted to achieve.
DirectX has now pretty much been replaced with XNA. Replaced is a loose term there because of course DirectX is still available as a low level library – but Microsoft have a large push on the XNA technologies. XNA allows you to develop game code in c# that targets windows, zune, and xbox 360. Now I know there will be a lot of pure programmers out there who would despair the concept of coding in c#, but hey, things move on. I’m getting a bit long in the tooth now and coding in C++ really doesn’t interest me anymore.
So I like the concept of XNA and C# – apart from two things – the minimum requirement and the platform dependence. You have to have a graphics card that has shader model 1.1 support. The laptop that I am typing this on – doesn’t!
I’m writing a 2d sprite based game. I want to use the graphics card to do all the work for me – why not, it can throw millions of textured polygons around the screen, so it will have no problem with my sprites – so why do I *need* shader model 1.1? Basically, that rules XNA out for me.
With regard platform dependence – I can target XNA using C++ if I use managed code. To be honest, after doing it, see my previous point – I can’t be arsed! Thinking about my target audience – really platform independance is not a major thing – the majority of them will be windows based. I intend to do a Mac version, but that can come later, and to be honest, porting from VB/c# to C++ or Objective-C – isn’t such a big issue.
DirectX can be used using managed directx. This is a way of accessing the libraries using c# or vb.net. It works well… I hade the prototype up and running pretty quickly using it – one problem – it’s discontinued in favour of XNA!
So that brings me to SlimDX. SlimDX is affectively a cross between XNA and Managed DirectX. It works a treat and doesn’t have the shader issue. So I have Timbles up and running in SlimDX very nicely!
This brings me back to another thing – the choice of language. As I mentioned earlier I coded the prototype in VB. After a little while of playing around, I made a decision: I’m going to leave the game in VB – why – well why not? The game is already up and running. I’m using the hardware for the audio and graphics. Thus the game logic doesn’t actually spend much time running in a update cycle. So why should I spend any time messing around trying to put it into another language. I actually prefer VB over c# – just because it’s simpler and there is nothing I can’t do in VB that I need c# for.
So the prototype has just moved to production code!
DirectX, XNA, Microsoft DirectX, XNA, Microsoft