MonoGame at the Global Game Jam Briefing

Another day, another room full of smiling faces. Or something.

You can excuse the audience for looking a bit shell shocked. They had just sat through a whole bunch of game development stuff. I started proceedings, with a fifteen minute section that I retrospectively titled “Watching Rob fail to get his tablet to work in lots of different ways”. After I got a picture on the screen and a keyboard and mouse that worked (something that turned out to be surprisingly difficult and worthy of a blog post all to itself) I did some stuff about how easy it is to get MonoGamae working Windows 8. You can find my slides and sample code here.

Then it was the turn of Simon to talk about good practice for game development and creating sprite sheets. Before this talk we had engaged in a game of “PowerPoint Chicken”. The game is very simple, the one who is the latest to have their slides ready for a presentation wins. I thought I was in with a good chance of winning, what with having my slides ready less than five minutes before the talk. Of course this left me no time to test my tablet, hence the pain at the start, Simon beat me easily, I think he was writing his deck while I was speaking. Which is probably cheating. Anyhoo, it all passed off well enough, with plenty of failing demos to keep the audience amused.

A word from the wise here, PowerPoint chicken is a dangerous game.

Finally Louis, one of our students, turned up and gave the best presentation of the day all about Unity. I’m really going to spend some quality time with this framework, it looks excellent. I’ll put slides and sample code from the other presentations later on.

Now it is full steam ahead for Global Game Jam Hull. We have over 100 folks registered, a bus full of folks coming over from Grimsby, a load of our students. And some games to make.

Applicant Day Meeting

Some of the folks at the briefing. Sorry if I missed you off the shot.

The university is soon going to be starting the round of Applicant Open Days for this year. Perhaps you’ve been invited. As part of the preparation we had a meeting today about what we are going to be doing on campus to make sure everyone has a good time and learns a lot. And I was asked to say a few words about what we do in our department (but not to tell any jokes). I told a joke anyway, as you do, and learned a few things that we can add to our open day experience, which was nice.

Cheese Lander is Coming To Windows 8

I spent some time today (lunchtime actually) playing with the latest version of MonoGame 3.0. This is the awesome framework that lets you take XNA games and run them on a growing number of platforms. I was interested in seeing if I could get a game to run on my Microsoft Surface. And I did. Behold, above you can see the venerable Cheese Lander actually running on my machine. Works a treat, and you can remote debug over WiFi. I’ll be talking more about this in my Rather Useful Seminar tomorrow.

Using Everything Everywhere at Hull

To be honest, I don’t use my phone much to talk to people. But when I do, I expect it to work. Last week it didn’t. And text messages didn’t get through either. Most annoying and embarrassing. I’ve had this problem before on the university campus, with a number of different phones. I thought it was just me until I spoke to James, who is also with EE (Everything Everywhere, a result of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile).

The good news is I think I’ve solved it. Delving into the mobile network settings on the handset I found that the Network selection option was set to “Automatic”. This means (I think) that the phone will search through available mobile networks and find one it is able to use. I wondered what would happen if I changed this to manually force the phone to select my network. So I brought up the menu to pick the network and found a couple of EE networks in the list. I tried each one in turn and, sure enough, one of them rejected calls and bounced text messages, while the other seems to work fine. So I’ve left the phone set to that version of EE.

I’m not sure if there is any downside here, my theory is that Orange and T-Mobile have “merged” their networks by simply giving them both the same name and one of them doesn’t work properly. This might mean I’m only using one network, rather than both of them, but I haven’t lost a call (that I know of) or failed to send a text message since I made the switch, which is definitely an improvement.

Update on 2013-01-22 12:26 by Rob

Ha. As soon as you blog about fixing something it breaks again. Still got problems with this. In fact, after discussion at coffee, lots of people with different devices on different networks have been suffering from problems recently. Perhaps it is the "upgrading" to 4G that we are hearing so much about....

Printing Lumia Cases

My printed case, and Joanna. The cutout for the camera fits absolutely perfectly.

BrianT popped a comment on the blog last week about the Lumia printing templates that Nokia have just released. They can be used with a 3D printer to allow you to print your own shells for the Lumia 820 phone. You get designs for the shell plus the buttons. You can download them here. What with having a Nokia 820 and a 3D printer to play with I thought I’d had a go. Initial results weren’t successful because the back section is very slightly curved in the original Nokia designs, which for a 3D printer like mine is impossible to print (although other kinds of printers will do this kind of shape). However, a chap on Thingiverse has created a Makerbot version of the case with a flat bottom. This prints a treat, as you can see above. The only thing I don’t like is the Makerbot logo, what with me having an Ultimaker printer and all.  But I can fix that by spending a few minutes in FreeCAD. In fact I can put whatever I like on there. In any colour I like.

The shell snaps onto the phone just like a “proper” one and I was very surprised to find that even the tiny buttons fit well and work OK, although I’m going to have to do a bit of trimming to make them move smoothly.

Remember that the lack of a 3D printer doesn’t stop you from making your own unique phone cases. Places like Sculpteo will take your designs and print them, including full colour if you really want it. Kudos to Nokia for making these drawings available for anyone to use.

Young Developers Launch Session

Hi to everyone!

I actually met up (over Skype) with the Young Developers today for the first time. They are taking part in a programme being run by Seton Hall University in New Jersey which aims to teach programming using Windows Phone as the target platform. A great bunch. They even laughed at my jokes.

I’m looking forward to working with you all over the coming weeks as we get started on the course. Feel free to get in touch and let me know what you want to build for your phone. This is going to be such fun.

Do Not Press This Button Unless You Mean To

I got into trouble yesterday because I pressed a button when I shouldn’t have.

Did the same today.

The fun started when I got an email from Kurt, who likes my Voice Music program (as well he might). But (and there is always a but) there was one improvement that he thought would be a good idea, and one bit that he had noticed didn’t work. So I had a look, and he was right on both counts. It took me a couple of minutes to change the feature and find and fix the bug, and then I wanted to update the application on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

I was working at speed at this point, because for some reason I wanted to watch Silent Witness and it was nearly nine o’clock. The Windows Phone Marketplace application submission page beckoned and at the bottom was the Submit button. Which I just pressed, thinking (or perhaps not thinking) that I’d be asked about uploading a replacement version on the next screen. Of course there was no next screen. That’s what submit means. I’d just started the resubmission process using the original version of the program. Wah. What a stupid thing to do. I cursed and went off to watch an hour of daft telly.

Fortunately it is not a huge problem. Since the application hasn’t changed and it was certified OK last time it won’t take long to certify again. Then I can resubmit the fixed program.

So, the lesson here folks is that you need to upload the new version of your XAP file before you hit Submit. Common sense really.

Update on 2013-01-19 16:12 by Rob

Got a notification that my original version of the program has been certified again, so I can now publish the fixed version. And then my PC broke. Ah well.

How To Break a Cube (and how to mend it)

Nice to see the rev counter above zero…

I did something terrible to my Cube on Tuesday. At the time I never thought, but you never do, do you? I started it up to go to work, and then changed my mind about using the car and turned it off again within a minute or two. Which you should never, ever, do to an engine. Ever.

Of course, I paid for this mistake today. The Cube has a button start, which means that rather than turn a fuddy duddy old key, with the Cube I just press a button and the engine starts. I’ve often wondered what would happen if the engine didn’t start. Today I found out. It spins for around 15 seconds and then stops. So you press the button again and the same thing happens. Stupid me. I knew instantly what was wrong, but I was less sure how to fix it. The car was flooded. This means that the engine was full of petrol and not much air. So no combustion and no working engine.

To understand the problem you have to know what happens when a car engine is first started. To get things going it is best to put in lots, and I mean lots, of petrol. Older cars had a thing called “the choke” that did just that, blocking off the air supply and squirting extra fuel in. You had to pull the choke when the engine was cold otherwise it wouldn’t start. Once the engine had fired up you’d then push the choke back in as the engine got warmer and warmer. Of course modern cars don’t have any of this choke nonsense, they have a clever engine management system that pumps in lots of petrol when the engine is cold and then reduces this as it warms up. On Tuesday morning the engine was still in the middle of doing this when I turned it off, leaving the cylinders full of petrol. Wind forward to this morning and the engine wakes up, pumps in whole bunch more petrol hey presto, flooded. Wah.

In an old car the only thing you could do was close the choke and progressively floor the accelerator while the engine turned over to force lots of air into the engine and hopefully clear out the petrol. In a new car you don’t have this level of control because your pedal is just connected to the engine management system. Fortunately the makers of the Cube have thought of this, and they let you do the same kind of thing to fix it. So I eventually got the car going and drove to work. And all at six degrees below zero. And its been fine since because I haven’t been stupid since.

So, if you start a car in this weather, let it run for at least five minutes before you turn it off again. And if you flood it, i.e. it turns over but nothing is happening, then try pushing the accelerator down gradually as you turn the engine over.

Snow Show

Say what you like about the snowy weather, it does make for some nice photo opportunities. Although it also means I’m presently wearing two pairs of socks, two jumpers and a bright red nose.

Rather Useful Gamejam Briefing

As a way of preparing you for Global Gamejam Hull (you have signed up haven’t you) we’ve got an extra special Rather Useful Game Development Briefing next week.

• Louis Deane will be talking about Unity development.
• Simon Grey will be talking about making 3D spritesheets with dynamic lighting effects by using shaders
• Rob Miles will be talking.

(actually I’ll be talking about creating XNA games for Windows 8 using the Monogame framework)

The briefing session will be on the afternoon of Thursday 24th of January from 1:30pm to 3:30 in Lecture Theatre D, the home of the “Rather Useful” brand. You don’t have to sign up for GlobalGameJam in order to come along, but those who have signed up will be allowed to sit at the front.

Get Into Global Game Jam Hull

Global GameJam Hull is picking up speed. Registrations are coming in thick and fast but we still have room for more. We want to fill Hull Studio School to bursting with folks who are keen to make games and have fun. We were down at the venue making plans today and we’ve got most things sorted out, thanks to some sterling work from Tom, Simon and team. Networks have been tested and upgraded, venues selected and a fantastic poster designed (thanks for that Lewis, love the critic with the scary eyebrows). All we need now is you.  If you aren’t convinced that you need to take part I’ve jotted down fifty reasons why I think you should come along.

1. You will learn stuff.
2. You will make stuff.
3. You will meet interesting people.
4. Including me.
5. And Simon.
6. We will have professional game developers taking part.
7. And game publishers.
8. Taking part will give you something to talk about at job interviews.
9. And to put into your portfolio.
10. There will be Free Food.
11. And Drinks.
12. You might win a big prize.
13. Or a little one.
14. There will be toys to play with.
15. Including networked Xbox Gaming
16. You might get worldwide fame and recognition.
17. Or you might just get your next job.
18. It only costs five pounds to register.
19. You might get to play with crayons.
20. We will let you write on the walls. (at least some of them)
21. You can bring your friends with you.
22. You can make some new friends too.
23. You can forget completely about the outside world for 48 hours.
24. You might become a viral sensation because of your awesome turn on our live webstream.
25. You can make a board game if you like.
26. Or bring one along and play it.
27. You get to see what other people are up to in this area.
28. And maybe even start a company with them.
29. You get to take part in a worldwide event.
30. It will be nice and warm.
31. You can wear what you like (But please wear something).
32. You will get a shiny nametag to wear.
33. There will be movies to see.
34. And some breakout presentations.
35. You can even choose the subjects of the talks.
36. You might meet a childhood hero.
37. Or become one.
38. You can stay the whole 48 hours if you like.
39. Or you can sneak off home for a shower and a power nap.
40. You get to choose your pizza toping (But not too many anchovies, OK?)
41. We will have fizzy drinks and sweeties available (great at 4:00am).
42. You can bring your guitar if you like.
43. There will be nobody there playing the accordion. (Unless you like the accordion, in which case we will try to get someone in. Or your could bring yours at a pinch)
44. You can mention it on Facebook.
45. And maybe even blog about it.
46. And Tweet too.
47. The more people that come along, the more fun it will be.
48. TV on a Saturday night is rubbish now that Strictly has finished.
49. It might just change your life.
50. It is certainly a great way to fill 48 hours of it.

Actually, if you are serious about getting into game development I really think you should come along. When you go for a job, and you are sitting alone on your side of the big desk, they are going to ask you something like “What have you done with your life?”. You could easily spend half an hour talking about the fun you had at GlobalGameJamHull, the people you met, and that silly game you published as a result. As you say those things you will see the interviewers checking things off in their heads “Works well in a team – check”, “Likes making games – check”, “Not afraid to put their ideas out there – check”. And so on.

I can’t guarantee that going to GlobalGameJamHull will change your life. But I can guarantee that if you don’t go, you’ll miss out on the chance that it could.

Sign up at http://globalgamejamhull.com/

Printing LED Enclosures with Ultimaker

Spent some time today doing some 3D printing with the Ultimaker. And by some time I mean quite a while.

Nearly a six hour print, one of my longest so far

I’m making an enclosure for a set of Gadgeteer LED Matrix Modules from GHI. I want to combine four of them to make a 16x16 dot LED display. Once I’ve built it and got them working I’ll figure out what to do with them. I spent a while last week printing out version one of the enclosure. Rather stupidly, I made this exactly the right size, i.e. 120mm wide internally. I figured that since the units were 60mm in size each that would work fine. Not so. It made them just the right size to not fit. It is a testament to the Ultimaker printer that they would not fit either way because they were exactly the same size as the opening in the enclosure. Darn.

So it was out with FreeCad and away to design a new enclosure with an extra mm all round, so that I could actually get the units into it. I also added some support pillars that engage with the Gadgeteer boards behind each display. What I need now are some really slim nuts so that I can bolt the displays in place.

This is the finished print, complete with “sprue” that I’ll have to clean off. It took me ages to prise it off the blue tape. I think I need to adjust the platform a bit to make the top layer a bit smoother although, for this build, you don’t actually see this bit.

Here is the tray with the LED units fitted.

Batman 2: DC Super Heroes for PS Vita

… and you get a free Lex Luthor model too.

I really like my PS Vita. I’ll like it even more when the Pinball Arcade people get the Twilight Zone pinball table onto it. However, that will be for a future blog post. Today I picked up a copy of Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. I’ve always liked the Lego series of games, with their great characterisations and polished gameplay, and this implementation is just as charming as earlier ones.

They make a point of mentioning that the characters now actually speak, which is nice enough, although I always liked the way that they managed to make gestures and sound effects work so well. The PS Vita experience is remarkably like that on the big screen, although each area seems a little bit smaller than the ones I remember from other games. The emphasis is on teamwork, of course, and your computer controlled buddy is just as keen to help as a real one would be. It looks like you can do two player cooperative mode too , which is how the game should really be played.

The puzzles are mildly taxing, and it is impossible to die or get stuck, something which at my age I find really attractive in a videogame. There is also the attraction of being able to play as Superman later on, which will be fun.

If you have  PS Vita and you like Lego games then you won’t feel short changed by this, I’m enjoying ploughing my way through the levels.

Fun Fact: The original physics routines in the first Lego games were written by a graduate from our game development course at Hull, who saved the company a fortune by removing the need for them to buy an expensive physics engine.

Nokia 920 Wireless Charging

Pad of Power – Pity it isn’t Yellow..

When I bought my Nokia Lumia 920 I was offered a free wireless charging pad. Today it arrived in the post. It is a slim, white, affair with a slightly beefier power supply than the one that came with the phone. You plug it in, place your Lumia on the pad and it charges the phone.

That’s it.

It just works. It takes a bit longer than wired connection and it does work if the phone is in the case, although in this case it seems to take slightly longer and the phone itself gets warm. This is either because there is greater inefficiency if the phone isn’t directly in contact with the charging base, or perhaps the case keeps in the normal charging heat you get when you charge a battery. Either way I rather like it. The only thing I’m less keen on is the charging light, which is an ultra-bright white led. If you have the charger on your beside table you had best point the light away from you as it is super bright in the dark. If you’re like me you’ll have dreams where you are being chased by people wielding powerful torches until you turn it round a bit.

I can now feel the tiniest pang of pity as I watch number one wife plug her iPhone in every night for charging. Nice enough phone, just not keeping up with the times.

Blogging the Rob Miles Way

I’ve been blogging now for over ten years. I’m still not sure why. The best explanation I can come up with is that I’m happier blogging than not. And having done it for so long it would seem silly to stop.

At one time I thought that writing a blog would make my life more interesting, in that I’d start doing interesting things just so I can blog about them. It hasn’t quite worked out that way, but blogging has provided a place where I can jot down things that happen so that I can go back and read them later. It has also vastly improved my writing style and speed, so that I can dash off an article like this in around 15 minutes (I’m timing myself). If you are thinking about starting blogging, here are a few tips from someone with a lot of experience, if nothing else.

Pay for your services: I get my hosting from Squarespace, store my pictures on Flickr and host my domain names at Free Parking. There are lots of free services out there, but I really like the way that if I have a problem I can talk to someone with a financial stake in making me happy again.

Get a domain name: I was lucky enough to be able to get the use of robmiles.com. You might find that your name has gone though. Not a problem. I’m a big fan of running words together to make domain names. For a while I had theresalotofitabout.com but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Make a name that fits you and then register it. Your blog host will provide a way you can link that domain name to your site (Squarespace make this very easy) so that you don’t have an identity which is tied to any particular service provider.

Blog regularly: You don’t have to blog every day. Only an idiot would try to do that. Just make sure you have a regular heartbeat of a blog every now and then. If you start off blogging every day and then stop for a week it can feel like you have to do seven posts before you can put down that thought you just had. This makes a mountain between you and your next blog post that gets bigger every day. Just blog when you feel like it.

Blog for yourself: If you start blogging thinking that you are going to make a huge name for yourself and will get thousands of worldwide follows then think again. Unless you are very lucky, or very rude, you won’t get much attention. Your mum will read your blog, but there is no guarantee that anyone else will. I started blogging because I enjoyed the challenge, and because I wanted to improve my writing skills. I also thought it would be vaguely useful to be able to point people at my blog if they wanted to find out about things I’ve done. I also use the blog as a way of jotting down things that I’ve discovered and don’t want to have to discover again.

Don’t blog everything: There’s a lot of stuff in my life I don’t blog about. Don’t feel that because you have to blog every day you have to asset strip your private life just to get a post together.

Find a group: At Hull we have hullcompsciblogs.com which acts as an aggregator for blog posts. Posts from lots of our students are brought together there and shared. I have a habit of going on there and finding out what people are up to. Since my blog is on there this also means I have a “ready made” audience for my posts.

Syndicate: When I started blogging I found that people who wanted to comment on a blog post would just put their comment on my blog directly. That doesn’t happen now. Instead people will comment on Twitter or on Facebook. Look at using If This Then That to alert people to your posts, and make sure that you watch the feeds to catch comments and reactions. I use Windows Live Writer to create my posts, that has a plugin that will automatically send a tweet each time I make a blog post.

Track your Traffic: One nice thing about Squarespace is that it gives you very good traffic analysis. I also use Google Analytics to see what is happening on my site. This can be quite depressing, but it does provide a way you can find out if your audience is growing (it should do) and which of your posts were the biggest hits with readers.

Enjoy your blogging: I managed to find a voice, a style and a workflow that works for me. Every now and then I have the “Oh crikey, I have to do a blog post now” moment, but these are fairly few and far between. If blogging becomes a chore or a pain then you should either stop and do something else, perhaps a project website or get involved with a forum. Or write poetry, or a novel. Whatever you do I’d strongly advice keeping writing though, it is a very useful skill to have.

Learning and Teaching Conference

Some of the audience. There is another picture on Flickr, click through to find my photostream. The camera is going through a French Impressionist blurry phase at the moment (or I didn’t hold it still enough). Apologies for that.

Earlier this year I was gobsmacked to find that I had been given a “Inspiring Teacher Award” as part of the Student Led teaching awards at the university. Very nice. As a result I also got invited to do an “Oral Bite” (is there any other kind) about being inspiring at the University Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.

So on Monday I wrote five minutes worth of material and this lunchtime I got to strut my stuff. It went very well and they were a lovely audience, once I found my slide deck. There were also some great sessions on teaching, the future, and where the university is going with all this. It was really nice to meet up with a bunch of folks who teach quite different things, in different ways, but all with the focus on giving the students the best learning experience possible.

There were quite a few questions on blogging and stuff like that. Stay tuned for my post tomorrow, where I’ll be doing a blog post on how I make the publishing legend that is the Rob Miles blog…..

Kinect Augmented Reality Session

Some time last year I went down to London to give a talk about programming the Kinect sensor (and to gratuitously plug my Kinect Book) at an AR in Education Event organised by JISC.  The videos of the sessions have been available for a while and since this is my blog I thought I’d mention them….

Sunken Condos on Vinyl

Not my best record deck, but not bad for 22 year old plastic Panasonic device.

Donald Fagen, half of Steely Dan, has recently released a new album. Since he is the guy that made “The Nightfly”, one of my all time favourite records, I thought I’d celebrate by buying a version on vinyl. It arrived today. A three sided album. The fourth side really is just shiny plastic. I grabbed my little record deck back from Mike’s office, where it has been languishing for a while, took it home and fired it up.

It sounds great. Very much in the same style as later Steely Dan stuff, which is not terribly surprising I suppose. If you like complicated, laid back, jazzy sounds then you’ll like it. Not sure if It sounds better or worse than the CD version to be honest, but it really does sound good. I’m terribly impressed by the way that we managed to get such amazing sound quality from a plastic disk with a wavy line pressed into it.

When you consider the complicated processing power that is used to move music around today, it seems incredible that my stereo reel to reel (which I must get down from the loft some day) made do with 18 transistors. And my first amplifier didn’t have many more.

I’m not sure that I want to go back to the day when skipping tracks meant waving a needle around just above some very easily scratched plastic, and where every twenty minutes you had to get up and change the record, but just this once I reckon it is worth it.

Fun with Dancing on Ice

I was watching “Dancing On Ice” tonight (or at least it was on in the kitchen when we were having tea). I had a great idea. They could give the program a whole new feel by adding a different prefix to the last word each week:

• “Dancing on Rice” – dancing and cooking. Contestants slide around on a bed of rice while preparing a nice chilli con carne to go with it.
• “Dancing on Mice” – not real mice, of course, but computer ones. Contestants have computer mice fitted to their feet and must navigate a Word document and correct spelling errors whilst executing a triple axle (whatever that is).
• “Dancing on Price” – the contestants must find the cheapest ice rink in the country and then dance there using skates they’ve made themselves from trainers and old breadknives held together with second hand gaffer tape.
• “Dancing on Lice” – ugh. An “I’m a Celebrity” jungle feel where they must dance on horrible insects without the aid of hairnets. Extra marks for those moves where they spin round with their head inches above the floor.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Sticking Plugs on Saturday Night

There’s an old saying “Nothing like a sticking washbasin plug to improve a Saturday Night”.

It doesn’t get said very much though. And I don’t think it is true. Our sinks have these new fangled plugs. Rather than a plug they have a “push-down, push-up” design. Unfortunately, one of ours decided to get stuck down tonight. So, rather than watch the bounteous entertainment that is Saturday night TV (irony alert) I was instead dismantling waste pipes and wondering just what was that icky slime that my hands were now covered with.

The good news is that by judicious use of the hammer (i.e. not hitting it that  hard) I managed to free off the offending item and it now works fine. The bad news is that while I was doing this I inflicted a tiny scratch (which only I can see) on the fitting which is going to bug me for a while. A home tip, if you have one of these kinds of plugs, it is best to push them up and down a few times each week, otherwise they’ll do what mine did…