Ronenix.com

Just some post to say that this blog will become barren from now on. Please move your gaze and interest over to http://ronenix.com -- Yes new domain and site, that's where all my stuff will be posted/updated etc.

I shall come back later for my final blogger burial post.

Ron

Cliffy B way over his head? about PC Market 'Disarray'

First of all everyone should be known to Cliff Blenszinski. If you haven't, then I suggest you go and buy this for the PC : Gears of War. Play through it and, obviously, you'll see him in the credits

If you know already and smart to figure out what I'm trying to say, then well done, but I will explain anyways.

Recently found this interview of lead creator of GoW: Cliffy B while he was at DICE gaming summit. The article can be found here: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/02/13/gears-of-war-creator-update/ .
First half of the article meantions some personal aspects of his life, but what caught my attention was the second half of the content.

Cliffy pretty much stated that their primary focus now is in console gaming, pointing out that the PC market was in "Disarray". Point to that he gave was that Gears of War sold almost 4 times as much as PC the version, so we'll probably end up seeing less Epic games in the PC.

Although, console market right now is huge, I just thought that his point of view at that moment was partly irrational. Initially PC gaming market was hard to get into, but monster games like World of Warcraft are what Cliffy B stated is partly to blame for the overall drop in PC gaming. He has a point, but Cliffy also forgot that Gears of War was pretty much "the" next-gen game for the Xbox 360 and it was made initially exclusive. With EPIC changing over to console, we'll probably see more of this occurring during the year. I don't know about you my thought are that VALVE are also showing signs...maybe.

The artcle got me also thinking about PC gaming market prospect. The future is slighlty bleak. I mean as last year stated that 14% of total games sold was for the PC: http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/01/pc-games-hit-ma.html. Initially my thought, in general was, that big games like the Sims and World of Warcraft made it difficult for other genres to get it's spotlight in the scene, but what these are also doing a good job of keeping the PC gaming market intact.

I think what this effects are mostly the hardcore PC players. There will still be gaming in the PC but more as casual Bejeweled players rather than your PC overclockers nerds, like me I admit, trying to squeeze extra processing power for a few extra framerates, and I think that's why it has it's effects on me.

My tuppence worth.

So please buy some PC games. *smiles*

Master Chief-ness of the Halo Movie

Well as far as I am aware of the Halo movie directed by Neill Blomkamp is still on the go. The pre-production is on the way and we should see this movie coming out around 2009/2010.

But that's not was this post is about. Recently N'Gai got exclusive interview with Joseph Staten who's the writing director for Bungie, talking about how our enigmatic Master Chief will be portrayed in the film.

To a certain degree of surprise Joseph stated, during the Q&A interview, that the exclusive main role for the movie would not circulate around Master Chief as it is highly that his role become more as a supporting character.

To my understanding and knowledge playing through Halo series, portraying Master Chief would be very difficult just as Joseph stated:

"Where the Master Chief doesn't have a face, but he has a whole body to emote with, whether it's his spine, or his shoulders. or the tilt of his head, or the way he slumps or reloads his weapon. There are these kinesthetic responses that he'll have which will really easily communicate the character and what he's feeling. That's hard to carry as a main character for an entire film."

Then explains that the role would best suit him as supporting character, where the people (Marines) around him will have better focus.

Real live clips released in conjunction with the release of Halo3 focuses more on the Marines that try and die to help Master Chief on his mission and ideally that's my thought on where this movie will be going towards. If you think about it Master Chief would not be a legend himself without the help of his Marines, although game-wise portrayal they just seems to be of a nuisance and cannon fodder. What I'm saying here is that if the sophistication of the AI meets our standards as humans we here would be praising the Marines.

Keeping Master Chief's anonymity is better here in my own opinion. First of all Master Chief deserves a good rest. Secondly, some people might be as sick as hell seeing Master Chief through the trilogy and having him in movies gun-blazing down isles decimating grunts, may feel like that they're just playing the game again in real vision.
But, for me personally, keeping his real identity anonymous allow peoples creative juices to run. We all know Master Chief, and having his name pop up on other Halo franchise is great for the game and for fans. When you put a line to his story then that could eventually end Master Chief's reign.

In the end, what approach the film will take I'll take in with no effect as long as the film is good itself, and in conclusion and a slight respond to N'Gai's article, I would prefer the movie to go this way rather through Master Chief's visor assuming that Neill continues to use his camera-vérité filming technique were everything seems to feel as though it's filmed like a documentory or through a reporters camera.

Links:
- N'Gai Joseph Staten Halo Movie Q&A
- Halo3 Real Life Movie Clip (Youtube)

Excel Games. No really Excel games!

It seems the title has off with making it exaggerated but new you can go make games from one of Microsoft's office tools: Excel. Funny as it may seem Super Llama over at GameDev has done something like this. If you head over there (links at the bottom of post), read up on the mini tutorial and notes on how to run the game in excel.
The game uses VB macro system, and tells you at the end of the article how to set this to work on your Excel sheets if you insist on making an excel game for your own.
My thought is that if I have available time to spare I would get in and reproduce a simple copy of Tetris or Breakout. By manipulating each cell colour like its been done on this demo, you sure would be able to make blocks moveable and seem animated.

I'm more interested in the final comments of the page
Quote: "Keep your eye out for the Excel Maze API version 2!"

Links:
- Excel Games

Lightsprint SDK available for Eval

I've always been fobd on trying to get Lightsprint (older versions) running on my now ubiquitous rig. After reading up that Lightsprint had been liscenced I went back to take a better look at their lighting middleware. The new SDK is now available for evaluation unfortunately for people like me, you need a company name to represent you. Although I will try and approach the situation in academic terms and see what they have to respond to that.

For those people, they kindly made another demo showcasing Lightsprint's capabilities. If you're still wondering what I'm talking about Lightsprint is a lighting tool that allows you to integrate global illumination into your engine and game. The list of features can be seen here.

Now the demo they release, you can use to benchmark on your PC. My system at the moment runs on AMD Athlon 64x2 4400+, 2GB of Ram and a 7900GT, my average fps was 78.9. It never went below 32 fps and I ran the benchmark on max monitor res 1280x1024. Lighting on other engine such as Crysis and Unreal uses approximations for dynamic lighting.
Lightsprint allows you to run realtime global illumination in a dynamic environment and well if you check out the demo, it's highly optimised. You can get the demo from the Lightsmark page linked at the bottom of this post.

For those just lazy enough you can check out this youtube video.

Groovy japanes tune.

Also another Lightsprint demo showcasing how colour bleeding in global illumination lighting can change everything. Its apparent here that colour bleeding provides a realistic lighting model and has become more important. It's all in realtime.






Links:
- Lightsprint SDK
- Lightsmark

Busy!

Back to lectures and first day sounds like good news for this blog/portfolio site. Why? well cause of Business of Computer Game module. No need to explain as time will show.

Anyways back to random ramblings. Was searching for fee prices for the halls in Bolton through Google. Yes I know, there's a perfectly fine search feature(a hint of sarcasm) on the Bolton uni website but since Google automatically opens itself for me then why not. Anyways I recently stumbled upon a link to "Good University Guide" and well decided its a good time to wilf about the net so I clicked the link and it opened up huge information about Bolton University. If you do care about the University then you may want to check up on this here and here. I trust all broadsheet infos, even though its last years, Bolton University has some distance to go.

Now what I did was made comparison to my first choice university. That's right, I did not get into my first choice due to 20 credits short. Wanna know where and what degree I was going to do. Check it here http://www.reading.ac.uk/Study/ug/ComputerScienceandCyberneticsBSc.asp
Reading Uni had cybernetics with computer science which what I really wanted to do. For the insurance choice I made sure that I'll get that insurance choice no matter what, and Bolton University got the spot. Nothing against the university here, nothing subtle.

Anyways I ended up comparing the two. Here's what I got:

From the tables student satisfaction I agree with, as I am in fact satisfied where I am, more satisfied than I was a couple of years ago. Other stuff, Bolton has a lot to work for and I'm sure I will move up a spot by the end of this year. I checked this last year and Bolton was joint 99th position with another institute, so it goes to say something at least.

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In my recent dev ramblings I found some nice infos and articles whilst I was wilfing around.

My AGTEngine portfolio work uses RakNet middleware and I usually ramble about how good and easy it is to integrate networking capabilities into your engine if you're also in the same process. This awesome UDP networking middleware is great for games and I recommend it alot if you plan to get the most of middleware codes. Anyways Jenkins (lead developer) has made a feature list video which you can check out here. Visit main webpage here.

Also found a nice article today on gamasutra headlining "
UK Government Considers Wii In Schools". Assuming Jack Thomson doesnt get there in time schools could be a little more interesting for kids. Report suggested that child obesity trebled in the UK and this could be one way of encouraging them to get some exercise once in a while. It's not suggesting that the Wii be used for something like cooking classes, instead of cooking, you're simulating, instead they plan on integrating and making the console available in PE sessions, making sure that in whatever forms necessary the child will get some sort of exercise out of it. It seems to even out the idea behind the fact that playing games could lead to less exercises and to the inevitable. Thanks to Nintendo.

Anyways the article; It may also be down to the department of health stated in the short article, and if we do face with this upcoming approach then my personal opinion would be is that kids are getting good at being spoilt. With any means necessary the government will do what ever it can. It seems nice for them to encourage children to play games but there's always nasty critics that would love to slate the hell out of this.

Just imagine when you have children-
You: "Hey matt, did you have fun today at school?"
Matt: "Yeah I played video games all day..."

For some parent that'll appall them but if the industry is well accepted that view may be all so different.
My response: "Tell me what game you played...was it on the 360?"
Surely a gamer's response and the inate response well here. At the moment education will just have to do with something else up their sleeves.

Just to leave with a nice article from Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16392

Peace.

New Years (Late) Update

Well I'll start of by saying Happy late new years! Been busy since new year working through some new years resolution lists ~_^
Well what kept me busy? Work obviously. Been trying to clear up loads of junk on my PC, backing up files etc. Also had to revise for an examination on the last week, and doing more work on my projects. Examination was okay. There was fair amount to write about, which usually lead to getting cramps on my hand.
No updates posted on these as of yet. All I can say that AGT project is way ahead of it's schedule and my level 3 AI project is pretty much in sync, although appearing to have some bugs and issues which should be managable. As for Air Roar, I received a nice comment from the guy behind Pyrogine2D and he is eager for me to use their API for Air Roar, although I'm already in the process of putting together my work for XNA, I will eventually try an implementation of this game through Pyrogine API sometime in the near future, but highest priorities to my Uni projects.

Up on my list of todos is to begin putting up my old work on my blog. List includes:

• RPG Game Engine made in OpenGL.
• Some old maps I created for CS:S and Half-Life single-player level.
• Very old but cool console text-based adventure game.
• A number of 3D rendering works.
• Video files.
• A number of C++/C# tools I've made since.
• Oh and Rm2k games, which aren't finished but have nice fully functioning custom battle systems.

Well next section of this post is usually stuff I found on the net.

See these images below:








All done in less than 10 mins, no joke intended.
You can make hi-res wallpapers like these here: http://www.wallpapermaker.net
Free to use wallpaper maker tool. Have fun! ^_^

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Streaming and listening to full albums from bands is never easier if you actually check up on http://www.deezer.com/

For the past week I've recently been listening to whole band albums through this site. Nice quality songs. You don't really need to register for the site to start listening to music. Just add the artist/album in the search file and start listening. Signing up is only for creating your own playlist and sharing your playlist to other members. I haven't registered therefor I am unsure on whether your playlist can be imbedded.

Another I always recommend is Pandora. I'm sure many of you have heard of this awesome site but for those that haven't, simply enter in some favourite bands/music and with Pandora it will play songs that sound appropriate to the band/song you've entered. Pretty neat and interesting use in querying songs of similar sounds.

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Tiinker

Usually early in the morning I spend a couple of hours reading news, blogs etc and it can sometimes eat more than just a couple of hours. Eventually you've spent 3+ hours without even having breakfast(LOL) and you eventually figured out that you've wasted most of your time reading inappropriate news. This happens regulary.
Then eventually I read up on http://tiinker.com/ and decided to give this new tool a try.
What it does is simply gives you a number of articles appropriate in different news/blog categories such as science, sports, technology etc and you give thumbs up or thumbs down for each short brief article summary. Depending on these ratings it will eventually spew out articles that interest you most. From here on you can continue fine-tuning your articles.
I've seen some improvements as I've been using it for the past couple of days. Your feed the articles in RSS and put onto your Google home page, which is very handy for me.

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Thank You Notes

If you ever felt the need to thank someone for something and you can't clearly put right a good "thankyou" note, you can check http://www.thank-you-note-samples.com. It has samples of thank you notes. I dont know when these would come in handy, but its something I thought was pretty interesting.


Ron