Wii Prayer

A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord...especially if they have a Nintendo Wii, complete with special Cross controllers and a Kneeler (all the fun of kneeling and genuflecting...in your own home!).

Yes, seriously, someone's making a game of this. Well, I think so anyway - if it's a spoof/hoax then it's being pretty thoroughly carried out.



If the minigames are good enough, I'll almost certainly be buying a copy of this. After all, WarioWare barely has any storyline at all and that's still one of the most popular Wii games..

The Hardest Escape Game You'll Play

This is one for the obsessive puzzlers amongst you:

Escape the room

Don't give up too easily, this game takes a while but there's nothing stupid in there and it's amazingly rewarding when you get to see this glorious, glorious sight:



Don't bother trying to decipher the Russian or Spanish text over the page - it's irrelevant. Enjoy. Try not to hate me too much.

Xx

A dartboard

Well, my degree's over and I never have to do another piece of coursework, joy! More on that later, but for now, here's a still image from my final piece of coursework:


_{Click to embiggen.}

Unfortunately, that's a nicely rendered image and when played in real-time, the darts game actually looks a lot more...crap. I spent a lot of time choosing that word; it really is the most appropriate. Especially given that the networking (you can play the game online) is sketchy and the Wiimote controls are challenging at best.

Still though, looks pretty doesn't it?
Xx

--

Blender Game Engine, Blender Render. Grab me if interested in anything else or if you want a copy of the game.

Robot Dinosaurs..

..that shoot lasers when they roar.

Seriously, it doesn't get much better than this.

Play to the end, there's only one level and the outro is more than worth it.

Fun With Games

Faced with the choice of taking Immersive Environments and Games Design paired with Computer Animation - or Geographic Information Systems and Data Mining I tried, I really did, to pick the sensible options where I'd actually learn useful, re-usable skills for my future employability.

Alas, I failed, and I'm now spending half of my teaching hours playing with various games engines and 3D models. I'm not entirely sure what, if anything, I'm learning - but it's fabulous fun and mostly coursework based (which I thought was great, until I realised how much more work I've got left for my Final Year Project).

Here's some samples of the fun:

1. An Unreal level

No, not one of the exciting kind of Unreal, like Unreal Tournament - but just the physics and graphics engine. Oh well, I still made a fun little 'puzzler' out of it - and managed to submit the coursework with 13 minutes to spare. Let me know if you want a copy of the map (the runtime's free to download) - and here's some screenshots for now.


<sub>It has flames and noises and smoke and everything in game ^^


This holds a big glass ball, eventually - looks quite cool empty though I think.


Stained Glass; technically impressive, visually quite nice too.


The great outdoors.



Holes in the walls o.O


Another arty angle.</sub>

Also, if anyone cares, there's a step-by-step guide to how I made the level, that I submitted as part of my coursework, available here (yes I know one of the links there is dead, you'll work it out though, you're clever people).

2. Pacman 3D

The end of today's lab class simply stated 'Create a PacMan-like game'. I always wondered what PacMan would be like if he was actually a sphere, rather than a circle, and obeyed the laws of physics, bouncing off and around things. Now I have my answer; rubbish.


_{Yes, the graphics are rubbish - but I did knock the whole thing together in 30 minutes.}

3. Pumpkin

I was quite bemused when we were asked to create a small game whereby a pumpkin (complete with flickering candle innards) bounced around, opened a door and jumped off the end of the world. I had endless fun setting up the pumpkin to be smashed miles into the air by the force of the opening door though:

3D Chess

On finding myself torn away from a computer screen for some reason, with alcohol in short supply, I'll often be found turning to nearby friends, family or strangers and offering them a game of chess. They decline, with a stuttered excuse and I get to feel intellectually superior for the rest of night.

However...

...every now and then, I'm caught out. Someone actually agrees to play with me and I have to start trying to remember strategies, to plan out moves and construct elaborate defences. Soon enough, I can simply use a delightful mix of verbal gamesmanship and bluffing to lead them into making a mistake and claim a win - but this is very risky territory indeed.

So, as an alternative, I'm going to learn 3D chess.

Now, my original plan was to learn how to play Asimovian Hyperchess (yes, named after our friend Isaac). This is just chess with one extra dimension - i.e., an 8x8x8 board. I have various ideas as to how I could construct a board, and the rules are fairly simple if you know how to play regular chess. Unfortunately, I can imagine games becoming impossibly long - just working out if you were in checkmate could take minutes.

There are other variants on 3D chess already out there, but only one appears to have any real following. In order to participate, I had to delve into the murky depths of Star Trek fandom, but I've been rewarded with what appears to be a full rulebook and guide to board-making for the Tri-D chess game seen in Star Trek.


_{Mine probably won't look this elegant}

At only $9.95, including international shipping, it seems a bargain. You can get your own copy here - I'll let you know how I get on.

Xx

Sokobina

I wrote a game!

You can download it here. You'll need Java installed in order to play it. If you don't know if you have Java, visit Sun's Do I have Java? page, and install it if necessary.

There shouldn't be any bugs left, but leave me a comment if there are. Also, please get in touch if you've made any cool custom levels, and send them across. You can find the levels you've made in the 'customlevels' folder that appears when you extract the game. Make sure you extract everything from the zip file before trying to play :)

There's a prize for the first person to beat every level. And yes, I do have a way of checking. If any of you CompSci folks manage to circumvent that then I suppose you deserve a prize anyway.


_{A screenshot from level 20}

Before you get too excited, I should point out that Sokobina is just another version of Sokoban (also known in English speaking countries as BoxWorld). I wasn't aware this genre was quite so popular though, when I started up I only had vague memories of a really cool Amiga game (this particular one had cavemen pushing rocks into holes, I believe).

I wrote it up myself for three reasons - to relive the fun of the game; to give some challenges to some friends I know like to solve puzzles and to work on my AI skills.

Only later did I find out that Sokoban, as a genre, is NP-HARD, and comparable to chess in the depth of the search trees you need to solve it with AI. In fact, Sokoban solvers have already been the subject of quite a bit of research, and for some harder levels, there are still no solvers that can do a decent job. I even found someone who wrote a solver for his Final Year Project - why didn't I think of that?!

I'm still working on an AI, which can then be used to find out if levels made via the creator are feasible or not. For now, there's just very trivial checking, so I'd recommend you play through your custom levels yourself (you can start a new game while the level editor is still open) to see if they're solvable before you email them to me or your friends :)

Let me know if anyone fancies dipping into the code and lending a hand, it's not too messy :)

--

Thanks for Forx for lending a hand with the graphics :)

Not enough time

Since coming back to University I've been busy pretty much constantly, with no spare time to just sit back and relax, or even to complete the occasional ancillary tasks that crop up from time to time.

I'm in University early every morning, even when I don't have lectures, so that I can get some research into Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems done for my Final Year Project. When I'm not working on that, it's preparation for assessed lab classes (each of which is worth 0.6% of my total degree!) or finding obscure references to satisfy the lecturer who's set the other coursework I'm currently working on.

When I get a break, I grab an orange juice and a banana or head down to the pool for my daily swim - I normally manage about 1Km a day before it's time to head back to lectures. Once I'm back home it's practicing and learning music for Tie-Dye Quartet gigs, more work on my Final Year Project and co-ordinating all my various extra curricular activities - societies, job applications, MS student partner stuff, all that jazz.

Mondays and Wednesdays are for Squash, Saturdays are for Ultimate and weekends in general are spent helping the homeless, raising money for charity and volunt...

---

Ok, enough lying. Let's try all that again:

---

Since coming back to University and getting addicted to Team Fortress 2 I've been busy pretty much constantly, with no spare time to just sit back and relax, or even to complete the occasional ancillary tasks that crop up from time to time boring paperwork I should really, really do sometime soon.


I'm in University early every morning, even when I don't have lectures [seriously], so that I can get some research into Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems done for my Final Year Project. When I'm not working on that, it's preparation for assessed lab classes (each of which is worth 0.6% of my total degree!) or finding obscure references to satisfy the lecturer who's set the other coursework I'm currently working on finding amusing stories on BBC News, following link after link on Wikipedia and continually F5'ing in my inbox.

When I get a break, I grab an orange juice and a bananaa sausage roll and a bottle of Lucozade or head down to the pool for my daily swim - I normally manage about 1Km 500m a day before it's time to head back to lectures collapsing in a heap and needing resuscitation from the lifeguard. Once I'm back home it's practicing and learning music for Tie-Dye Quartet gigs, more work on my Final Year Project and co-ordinating all my various extra curricular activities - societies, job applications, MS student partner stuff, all that jazzPLAYING TF2 FOR HOURS AND HOURS UNTIL MY EYES BLEED AND I GO TO BED WITH DREAMS OF HEADSHOTS AND SENTRY GUNS PLAYING THROUGH MY BRAIN.

Omega Sektor Closes

CompSoc's first gaming trip of the year was a tour of Omega Sektor, followed by 10 hours of gaming. About 30 members showed up and everyone had a great time - clearly the long hours I put into getting sponsorship for CompSoc were definitely a good investment of my time.

...the next day, Omega Sektor closed their doors and declared that they were in administration (leaving behind a large pile of Kit-Kats in the internet cafe area).

Apparently giving free LAN parties to large groups of students isn't a good business model eh? One to remember kids.

Now, what do I do with a hundred CompSoc t-shirts with the Omega Sektor logo nicely plastered onto them? Ideas?

Freshers' Fair '08

Today was the chaos that is Freshers' Fair, where hundreds of impressionable new students see the Guild Hall in daylight (and free of vomit and alcohol) for the first time, and cyncical final year students try every tactic they learned in their Business Studies lectures (which, let's face it, had to come in useful somewhere) to con the freshers out of their student loans.

I was on joint duty for CompSoc and LMS (Live Music Society), so it seemed logical to have the two stalls placed next to one another with Guitar Hero inbetween them. Unfortunately this rather impacted on my work ethic at times, but at least I looked rock 'n' roll:



Actually, it turned out to be a great idea, though it drew a lot more geeks over than it did musicians.

We got about 50 members for each society, which wasn't quite as good as I hoped, but we should get a bunch more over the next couple of weeks for each society. Now if you don't mind, I'm off to practise Guitar Hero III religiously for the next 50 hours straight. There was a chap there who could beat me at Dragonforce, and that just won't do.

We also sold a few more Tie-Dye Quartet albums, which was nice. Might need to print more if this keeps up ;)

Toys for me

Well, after less than two weeks my XBox 360 is on its way home, which means I'll finally be able to properly play Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis (surprisingly awesome) and some cool XBox Live Arcade games, such as Schizoid and Castle Crashers - both of which I was playing at Will's on the weekend.

I'm also getting a new PC (AMD Athlon X2 4800+, 3GB Ram, 2x 7800GT and lots of nice cooling and other bits) and a new monitor (see above), which means I'll be able to properly enjoy my latest acquisitions, Spore and TF2.

Seems a great time to start back to University, eh?

Omega Sektor Sponsorship

I headed out today to meet with some folks from Omega Sektor about partnering up a bit with my lovely Aston CompSoc. It seemed a fairly logical union, as we've got a bunch of geeks and they've got a hell of a lot of gaming PCs and consoles.

They gave me a quick tour of the place before we talked, and I was far more impressed than I thought I'd be. They're building a Wii area downstairs, with a bunch of large screens in cubicles for gaming fun. You know the only game that'll get played there is going to be Wii Tennis though.

There's also a giant-screen Wii (not sure how that works with the motion sensor), a PS2/PS3/XBox 360 console room and a whole bunch of rooms filled with gaming PCs, in varying formations for different team strategies - mostly shamelessly sponsored by big gaming companies that have little connection to the rooms.



After the usual kind of deal was agreed on (we promote their stuff, they give us free and discounted stuff and talk to our members), they even gave myself & a friend free run of the facilty 'till we got bored.

Great fun, highly recommended (and not just because they're now paying me to say that) - more details after our first CompSoc LAN there ;)

Me^6 & Back To The Future Drinking Games

I'm 22 years old...aaah! I did, however, have an awesome birthday to make up for this scary fact - and it started off with a bit of dress-up. Now, some people like to have fancy dress themes for their parties, and may choose 'rave' or 'western' or '90s' or something boring and impersonal like that. People will then pop out to a fancy dress shop, grab some tacky mass-produced rubbish and spent the night looking a fool.

Not at my party.

Hours of effort went into making wonderful masks featuring the star of the night, so everyone could revel in the joy of looking this beautiful, albeit just for one night, and just above the neck. Naturally, I understand that you'll want to do the same next time you have a special occasion, and have created a guide to creating your own Ina Mask


_{After much deliberation, it was decided I probably didn't need a mask of my own}

You may think that, being vain, I'd have been in my element surrounded entirely by people wearing my face - but I should point out that it was a profoundly disturbing experience, and one I'm not sure I'd recommend. I'm used to seeing other people's faces walking around, on top of bodies...I'm not used to seeing my own. Times six. With dark holes where the eyes should have been.


_{The looks we got walking down the road were priceless}

We went out for curry like that, and had some great fun with the proprietor of the establishment (though I did worry he'd think we were going to rob the place). The next morning we decided to hang up the masks around the place, as well as putting the copies of the photo that didn't make it onto a mask up. The entire place now has a very Orwellian feel to it, with my face watching you wherever you go.

The whole thing's doing wonders for fuelling my dreams of being a fascist dictator. One that dresses like a hippy. Reconcile that one sociologists.


_{I'm thinking of starting an entire range of branded accessories}

Once this was all over, it was time to watch Back To The Future, with drinking games. I'm afraid I've lost our exact rules, but here's a close approximation of what to do when you hear certain things:

Marty - Play air guitar - last one to play (or least rocking out) drinks.
Doc - Girls drink.
McFly - Everyone shout 'Great Scott!'
Great Scott! - Boys drink.
1.21 Gigawatts - Shark attack - anyone touching the floor drinks.
88mph - Surf's up - anyone not touching the floor drinks.

There were some more, but I forget them - one is possibly related to the other. Great night, having your own version of it is highly recommended.

--

Remember - if you want your own Ina Mask, I've created a guide to producing your own. Enjoy, send me pictures.

Imagine Cup 2008

Having paid a short visit to the finals of the Imagine Cup 2008 - as well as working across the office from the folks organising the UK's contribution to the whole shindig for the year, I thought I'd share a few of the more interesting entries I came across in this annual student technology competition, with a 2008 theme of 'Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment'.

Project SOAK

Overall winners, and a group of thoroughly nice chaps, the team behind Project SOAK decided to have a crack at reducing some of the water wastage used in agriculture (70% of water used on the planet goes into agriculture, don'tcha know?).



A range of sensors, displays and automated irrigation/hydration systems ensure that water isn't just needlessly dumped on ground that doesn't have enough - and also ensures that dry areas get enough of the stuff, so that crops don't wither away and die. It even ties in with mapping software, weather reports and SMS (for those emergency reports). Pretty cool stuff.

AcidRain

Ah, the Irish - everyone loves the Irish. These chaps, I believe, showed so much dedication to their project and faith in their work that they could easily have won the overall prize.

Their project, AcidRain, consists of a 'one size fits all' conversion kit which can get any diesel engine running on just vegetable oil - better for the environment and certainly better for the pocket. They're using Windows CE for the whole system - and no, Windows crashing wasn't the reason a tow truck had to come out at one point during their journey.

Their journey, that is - from Ireland all the way down to Paris. In their own car, which they'd fitted with their vegetable oil system. Hardcore.


_{The journey}

Team Austria - Photography

All of the entries for the photography competition came up with some impressive stuff, but my personal favourites were the folks from Austria. I'd recommend you view Team Austria's Photos yourself, complete with obligatory environmentalist sublines. I can't pick a personal fave, but here's just one example of their work:



City Rain

Built by some absolutely crazy Brazilians, City Rain is a SimCity-esque game focused around urbanism and sustainability. There's a quick video below, or you can just download the game and have a quick play yourself.



TreeTalk

Team TreeTalk from Korea literally listen to trees. Seriously. Apparently the electrical impulses produced by a sick tree are different those produced by a healthy tree, and by feeding these impulses into an algorithm they've invented, they can tell the difference, and monitor the health of a forest remotely. Leet or what? I get how all the technology works - but how on earth did they find out that trees produce these impulses in the first place?

--

That's that, you might want to browse the main site for details of some other cool stuff that people have made. I'll possibly be entering next year with a cool little idea I've come up with, assuming I can fit it to the theme and find a team to build it with me (along with the time myself!) - more on that if I do get around to it - would rather not publish the idea right now.

PRINCESS

As part of my 'teach myself Perl' initiative, I've been knocking together a little game I made up one long car journey by the name of 'PRINCESS'. Just like in those puzzle magazines people used to take on trains before mp3 players and knives became popular, the aim is to get from one word to another, changing one letter at a time.

The twist in PRINCESS, is that you're playing against someone else. You'll be given a starting word (say, 'beat') and each of you will also have a secret target word ('princess' and 'frogs' maybe). You can change one letter at a time each (that is, change an existing letter, add any letter, or remove any letter), but you must make a real word on your go.

You can't use a word that's already been used, and you can pass on your go.

The two player version can be pretty fun (unless you're playing against my computer player, who always wins), as can the single player (I can get from 'beat' to 'princess' in 9 moves, can you beat that?).

I'm currently working on beefing up the speed of the computer player (he currently takes a fair amount of time once we get down to long words, but I suspect this issue may be due to Levenshtein rather than myself). I'll release the code once I'm done there.

The game's pretty fun, but the coolest thing so far has been allowing the computer to pick a random start and target word from the Scrabble 'TWL' dictionary. When it does this, games are often impossible, but I find myself playing again and again just to see random words.

My favourite so far is 'microgrooves'. I have to use that in a game of Scrabble sometime. I'd even get 50 points if I put 'grooves' onto the end of 'micro' for using up my letters ^^

--

An alternative version you can play in the car, by the way, is to pick a random starting move and then simply go around the group changing one thing. The loser is the first person who can't make a word.

No-one can say a word that's been said before, or a derivative of a word that's been said. So, you can't have 'shotguns' or 'shotgunned' if you've already had 'shotgun'. Feel free to argue about multiple meanings all you want for extra entertainment ('page' = piece of paper, 'paged' = received a text message, so it's not a derivative of 'page' - etc).

Ghost is also good fun, and requires nothing other than brains, ears and vocal cords.

Camping with the boys II

Apparently, last year's camping in the Peak District didn't quite involve enough walking up mountains, so last weekend I accompanied Will Thompson, Tim McCormick and 'Terra' Ben Duff up to the Lake District for some walking.

Not having done my homework, I presumed this would be a stroll around some lakes, popping into one of the numerous lakeside pubs every hour or so. Apparently, however, I was mistaken, and the lake district is in fact, full of mountains.

We arrived a bit late on the Friday, so the only walking we got done was on the way to the drinking house. A bottle of wine apiece was followed by some stumbling home - with all of us managing to avoid the nearby river.

On the Saturday, we left early, and I was a bit surprised to see us walking up, and up, and up. Things weren't as flat as expected - and lots of short breaks to have a sit down and audition for various musicals were in order, given my hangover.


_{I don't recall quite what we were pointing at...}

Soon enough we were at the entrance to Striding Edge. No-one had thought to mention to me that we'd be crossing a path of certain death that was a couple of feet wide, with long long drops to either side.


_{Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah}

Upon Striding Edge, I had the choice of either walking directly across the top of the rocks (like the seemingly suicidal chap below) or taking a 'path' of sorts just off to the side in places. Once my fear of heights got the better of me, I took to the path, until it crumbled away from me - fortunately I was holding onto some rocks at the time, but I was still scared out of my skin by the experience.


_{Looks impressive, until you consider that there must have been enough space to the side for a cameraman at this point}

The day before I went walking, someone fell 200ft from Striding Edge, and there were a spate of deaths for walkers scrambling over the ridge earlier this year. Fortunately no-one informed me of this in advance, or I doubt I'd have made it over the top.

Next up it was a run down the side of a slightly less steep mountain (only a 45 degree gradient) to the beautiful lake surrounded upon all sides by the mountains we'd just been walking over, followed by a long (but safe) walk home.


_{Lovely lake}

A gorgeous meal in a surprisingly good restaurant that night was followed by another day's walking on Sunday. We found an interesting looking National Trust path from an ancient guidebook, and then somehow completely lost the path - possibly because it didn't exist any more.

Instead, we climbed up a river for a while (last year, Will climbed down a river) before reaching the amusingly (yet accurately) titled 'Surprise View', and then finally walking at ground level next to a nice lake.


_Surprise!

Last year, we popped off to nearby Bakewell, and bought some Bakewell Tarts from a Bakewell Tart. This year, we headed off to Kendal to buy some Kendal Mint Cake...from Woolworths. It was local produce, but apparently was only sold in high-street chain stores - bizarre.

On the way home, we played GHOST until that got boring, at which point I invented a new game. I've now called that PRINCESS, after a logo I accidentally doodled at a customer meeting when my colleague managed to talk about databases for an hour and a half, leaving me in silence, but I'll blog about that later, when I've finished computerising it.



So, all in all, camping was good fun all around, but I'm definitely in favour of somewhere flatter next year. Any suggestions? It'll have to be near somewhere famous for its confectionary..

So, so close

I've been guilty of neglecting Guitar Hero III for Rock Band recently, but I was just browsing through some pictures on my phone when I was reminded that I've not even managed to complete GH III yet - let alone perfect it. Disgraceful eh?


_{I actually wanted to cry after this}

I'll complete this finger-shredding epic one day...honestly. Just as soon as I beat Run To The Hills and Won't Be Fooled Again on drums on expert on Rock Band.

:(

It's Christmas!

I've just gotten home, spent ten minutes unpacking layers upon layers of paper, duct tape and cardboard, spent ten minutes more trying to set everything up and then 5 & 1/2 hours playing with my new toy. Then I had a leet meal cooked for me. It seems that despite what my homepage told me this morning, it is indeed Christmas.


_{Non-biodegradable plastic 1 - 0 Environment}


I have Rock Band.



_{What instructions manual?}

For those of you currently residing in a cave (but with an inexplicable 'net connection allowing you to read my blog) - Rock Band, released in the UK today, is the best game ever.


_{Apparently slot A went into hole J, once sliding under 'bit of plastic #14. Where's IKEA when you need them?'}

Imagine Guitar Hero III meets Singstar meets an electronic drumkit. I spent about 5 hours playing the drums yesterday, at the end of which I was actually sweating and all of my muscles ached. Who says computer games make you unfit eh?


_{Some may argue that having five Guitar Hero guitars is a bit much. Idiots.}

I've got the week off work, and Julie-oh's around to cook my food and bring me drinks, so now the only thing I need to worry about is whether to play drums or guitar, or have a go at singing, or shoot a lot of people in GTA IV (using the drumkit as a controller, obviously).


_{My vocal career was off to a bad start as I tried to work out which way up the microphone should go}

--

Idea: Next year my house will contain two guitarists, a drummer and a trumpeter. She was just complaining that there's no trumpet add-on for the game...but why not just use the vocals microphone? Another brilliant idea brought to you by Inacorp.

Guitar Hero Geekery

Geeks like computer games.
Geeks like building stuff.
Geeks like writing software.
Geeks like retro computing.
Geeks like to win at everything.

Geeks like Guitar Hero.

Here's what happens when we put all of these together.

1. Slashbot
Slashbot is the creation of some engineering students from Texas, and is a fully mechanical solution to automating Guitar Hero. We've already got some solutions that just fire off signals to the game, having hacked the controller - but this bot just reads the notes from the screen, and then physically presses the buttons on the controller. Very cool stuff.


_{Cliffs of Dover. I'm almost this good..}

2. Shredz64
Shredz64 is about bringing the whole Guitar Hero experience to the Commodore 64. Click that link to watch a couple of videos, but this should give you an idea of what we're dealing with:



3. Lego Guitar Hero
Ever wanted a Lego Guitar Hero Controller? No - me neither. But it's still farking cool that someone's gone to the trouble of making one, and that it's fully functional and playable.


_{More pictures on the link above}

4. Finally...
No subject-specific geekery can ever be completed without answering the age-old question - Will It Blend?

My copy of GTA IV is in the post...

...and I won't be home when it arrives!

*cry*