Well my favourite non-Brit cyclist Vincenzo Nibali had a fantastic ride today.  Over a mountain time trial lasting just 45mins he was 1 min faster than anyone else.  Amazing.

Evans had a shocker and is now 4 mins back in second with Uran, who has been great for Team Sky since Wiggo dropped out, now a close 3rd.

Some serious mountains over the next few says to look forward to 

[King of Kong]

Could of sworn I posted about this last week....

One for us gamers, King of Kong, about players competing to set video game world records.

It's a lot more interesting than it sounds as theses are some serious mind games going on and it goes into detail about the limitations of the classic arcade tech and how players had to exploit holes in game logic.

Excellent even if you aren't a gamer.  

I had a bit of code blindness last night and wasted ages trying to find the most basic of bugs. 

One of my timers seemed to be triggering immediately.  I checked and double checked my timer class and all seemed fine. I watched the various variables and all seemed fine. I renamed the timer to see if there was some sort of conflict and still no good.  In the end I deleted a chunk of code, rewrote it and it worked perfectly.  Curious I loaded up the old code again and spotted the proble straight away.

Oh crap. It's so obvious now

Code:

if ( timer.IsExpired );
{
 Do stuff
}

One of those mistakes you make once and make again. 

I've just been following The Shroud Of The Avatar And Elite Dangerous.

Both are really supporting their respective communities well.
Lots of community interaction and feedback.

All very interesting stuff and something i'm really pleased to see.

Yeah one of the best things to come out of Kickstarter is how it encourages developers to better communicate with their customers. 

Yeah, not having any inventory limit does away with the problem altogether. 

I see Molyneaux is kicking up a bit of a storm with Godus.  He's just announced a partnership with a mobile publisher for the iOS & Android versions, both of which will be freemium titles.

So many of his Kickstart backers paid for tiers that, as well as supporting development, included a mobile version in the price.  That seems pointless now as the mobile version is free, plus all the backers will now have to pay for the IAP's if they want the full game they thought they were getting when they backed it.

On the other hand i quite liked the way Oblivion managed it's inventory system.
Items displayed in a list were quick to navigate and equip / de-equip.

Yeah the Oblivion system was ok, although still a slight chore to search through things when using a joypad.  Whatever the system there must be plenty of sorting options an filters.


I wonder if there's a more flexible system for deciding how much you can carry as every system right now seems to be very black and white.  You can either carry something or you can't and, as in Oblivion, if you carry 1 gram more than you should you immediately can't move.

A system that lets you carry anything (within reason) up to a limit and then beyond that your speed and stamina slowly decrease.  Much more realistic and much less frustrating for the player.

Yeah I just download a text file too and that has a list of text based news entries, links and image urls. 

I've just found that I need to tweak it a bit.   There's no command in AGK to see if  url is valid so if, for whatever reason, it can't find the file I want then it downloads the 404 screen to a text file instead.....which then appears in my news feed window like the error messages in the recent Sim City 

I've added variable spacing to my bitmap text routines as the default kerning was too large making it hard to read as spaces weren't obvious.

I've also looked at adding speech bubble to Man in game.  The initial ones with single words in didn't really work as they get lost in the noise, so I'm going to have a look at putting simple smilies in thought bubbles instead.....although I'm not sure they will be any clearer in game either.  (I do most testing on hard where this "noise" is more of an issue, but if I'm adding something, even if it's just cosmetic, then it really has to work under all conditions).

So the XBox One (really?) was unveiled last night and it's fair to say the focus wasn't really on games.  This highlights vid sums things up perfectly. 

Xbox One Reveal 2013 Highlights	powered by Aeva

Microsoft really need to pull out some awesome games at e3.  Just 3 years ago the 360 was easily my console of choice and now it goes for months without being turned on.  Where did it all go wrong Microsoft?


It also looks like an 80's Beatmax top-loader.

Saw this sculpture on Wired and thought it looked really cool....the wire web giving the illusion of a billboard being there.  


http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/22/ghost-billboard

Interesting to hear your thoughts, as inventory management is what i'm currently coding.

And i'm endeavouring to make things as simple and easy to use as i can.

It's one of my pet hates so you better get it right

The only thing Farcry could have done to make things worse was to turn you inventory into one of those block puzzles where you have to arrange things to fit in a limited space. If I wanted that I'd play Tetris. 

Good to hear of progress JDog 

Well my side project of a visual twitter app using XNA is finished so I can return to focussing on bat game. Since I suddenly have alot of free time now, this project should really make some serious progress.

You should shoot it to my old uni, they run one on LCDs in the student areas and it's animated and fantastically slow. Stutters something awful, I don't know how they got it so wrong. XD

lol.  Probably because they employed a 3rd party developer who didn't give a toss.   

I more suspect it was done in-house by a student, hence the quality

Such a good advert for the uni 

Thanks

I'm going to have a quick try and see how fast an image downloads from the net and then look into the possibility of including that in the news stream.  I'll report back!

[Farcry 3]

Why is picking stuff up in the otherwise brilliant Farcry 3 such a chore?

They've made such an effort elsewhere.  You can craft new items anywhere rather than only at certain locations like in most other games, you are never more than a short run from a shop and when sprinting your character doesn't have an asthma attack and grind to a halt every 50m.

Then when it comes to the simple act of picking up items, searching bodies, swapping weapons etc it's horribly fiddly.

Firstly the collision boxes for items are so tiny you will be forced to do a little dance around any item you want to pick up before the prompt appears. Why?  If anything the collision boxes should be stupidly big.

Next the pickup button is also used for reloading so, if you don't want to reload, you have to hold it down for a second before you pick an item up.  That gets old fast in a game with so many collectables.

And for something like money why do I even need to press a button anyway.  When would I ever not want to pick it up?

And then there's the fun you can have trying to search a body.  When you kill someone who is holding a gun then more often than not he's going to fall right next to that gun.  Oh what fun you will have dancing around his corpse trying to get that prompt to change from "swap weapon" to "search corpse" and no matter how careful you are you will constantly swap weapons whether you cant to or not.


It's such a simple thing to get wrong and unbelievable it wasn't picked up in testing.  Maybe that was all done on PC where mouse controls make this a non issue?

Good to hear of progress JDog 

Well my side project of a visual twitter app using XNA is finished so I can return to focussing on bat game. Since I suddenly have alot of free time now, this project should really make some serious progress.

You should shoot it to my old uni, they run one on LCDs in the student areas and it's animated and fantastically slow. Stutters something awful, I don't know how they got it so wrong. XD

lol.  Probably because they employed a 3rd party developer who didn't give a toss.