Disney Infinity

Mrs Incredible (anyone know her first name?) I bought her so I could have two player action in the Incredibles world. I guess over time I’ll acquire the whole darned set..

Some time back I was lucky enough to be able to make a trip to Disney World in Florida. The place is amazing. The design and execution of the buildings and the rides and the way the experience is packaged is just fantastic. You can have great fun just looking for the places they have have hidden the iconic outline of Mickey Mouse and his big ears. Those three loops are in the paths, on the walls and even on the water tank. Everyone at Disney World is committed to giving you a great time, from the cheery train drivers who welcome you in the morning and say a heartfelt goodbye as you leave to the “cast” members in costumes who are happy to sign autographs all day long.

And yet, and yet, the place is really a great big machine that has been designed with the purpose of taking as much money as possible from you during your short stay. Around every corner are hot dog stands, ice cream stalls, souvenir shops and ride photo booths. While in theory it is possible to pay nothing once you have entered the park, in practice it is actually darned difficult. Particularly with kids.

Which bring us to Disney Infinity, the new release from Disney Interactive. It is a computer game and toy series that seems heavily influenced by Skylanders and Lego City, but able to draw on the vast reserves of Disney characters. For your money (and you will need money) you get a video game, high quality plastic models of Disney characters and a base that you can plug into your video game console of choice.

Each figure contains some RFID cleverness that lets the game recognise the figure so you can play them in the game, and also store game stats. In addition there are “power up” disks that you can add to give extra items, such as a horse to ride or boost a character health by 25% or so. There are also “world” models that give you access to different worlds.

In the starter set you get characters from Monsters University, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Incredibles along with a “world” block that gives you access to those three words. In no time at all you can be wandering round the campus as Sully, scaring all and sundry.

Each world sets you a number of challenges, very like the Lego City game, although for me the interaction with the environment isn’t quite as smooth as the Lego world and the narrative is nowhere near as interesting or well presented. When you complete challenges you “power up” your character, get cash you can spend on more toys and also tokens to unlock game elements that you can use to build your own worlds.

And therein lies the really interesting part of this enterprise. Because the Disney Infinity folks have also been taking a long hard look at Little Big Planet and Minecraft, and have included a mechanic that lets you build and share worlds. The only snag(and I reckon it is a big snag) is that you have to work through lots of mildly diverting, but not great, gameplay to get all the pieces that you will need to construct your creations. And a lot of the time it feels like work. And that is not what a video game should feel like.

The underlying engine seems able to handle the worlds very well. For me perhaps the most impressive part of the game was the very first stage, where you travel through a landscape that builds itself as you walk towards it. I’ve not really got far enough into the game to be able to make much interesting yet. My characters are slowly ascending through the ranks and making appearance in the “Hall of Heroes” that you must visit, simply to view the huge number of empty pedestals for heroes that have yet to be purchased…

Disney are in this for the long haul. They have spent a lot of money building their virtual theme park and the have huge amounts of back catalogue on which they can create new scenarios and sell us more pieces of quality painted plastic. The power ups provide a nice swapping mechanic (you are never quite sure what you will get in a bag) and the prices are enticing rather than completely extortionate.

If you went to Disney World and enjoyed it then you will love Disney Infinity. The starting pack is a very well thought out entry point, in that it gets you into the game but leaves you wanting more, and the beautifully painted models are an end in themselves. And if you really want to create your own fairy castle, complete with race track and pirate cove, you can use Infinity to do it. Good for children of all ages I reckon.

Deep Projection

Last night the chaps at C4DI were doing some trials of video projection onto “The Deep”. So a bunch of us went down to take a look. It was a lovely evening when we arrived and so we wandered round taking a few pictures. Today I got them out of the camera and took a look.

This is a slightly processed image of the footbridge over to The Deep.

This is a nice way to brand a building.

And these are jellyfish.

The test was for something big coming in November. Keep an eye on the C4DI website for more details.

Lumia 1020 Sky

I took this picture on the way into the office this morning. I just love that sky. The picture was taken with my Lumia 1020 phone. I was going to do an HDR version, but in the end I just used the one shot.

The picture is also interesting because you can do a “brick wall resolution test” with it. If you look at the bricks as they get smaller and smaller moving away from the camera they stay as individual items (you can click on the image above to view the full sized on on Flickr if you like). On some cameras the brick lines turn into a messy blur, but here they are perfectly resolved. Lovely.

I can bring any system to its knees

Earlier this year I bought a new computer. And now I seem to have broken it. I appear to have a rare talent, I can over time reduce any computer to abject uselessness. I have behind me a trail of Dell, Novatech and even Apple machines which have slowed down to a snails pace and become much harder to use. Just because I’ve been using them for a while.

My lovely Sony Ultrabook is still mostly lovely, but the touch screen driver has acquired an irritating habit of suddenly tapping the touch screen rapidly and making the mouse unusable. I can get rid of that problem by using CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the lock screen but it is still irritating. I’m not sure if it is hardware or software to be honest, it seemed to start after I took the (apparently stupid) step of enabling the automatic download of updates and the machine turned itself on in my bag and tried to commit thermal suicide.

I can live with the occasional touch screen foibles though, what I’m finding much harder to deal with is the way that the “Anti Malware Service Executable” will suddenly and violently take my machine away from me by pushing the hard drive activity to 100%. This happens after a reboot and when I’m trying to get something done and is very annoying. The stupid process seems to have no way of working out that “Robert is actually using the machine now” and just wades in and breaks everything.

While it is amusingly ironic that a program designed to protect me against my machine becoming clogged and unusable is actually making my machine clogged and unusable, it is also darned annoying.

Verity Stob writes of cruft, which builds up and slows down a machine, and I’m probably suffering a bit from that. I think that when Windows 8.1 shows up I’ll do a complete re-install and see if that sorts things out.

Fun at C4DI

This is the view from the window at C4DI down in the Fruit Market part of Hull. This is definitely a region “on the grow”, what with Platform Expo and a bunch of other tech folks setting up shop around there. As you can see, it is a stone’s throw from The Deep, a fantastic looking building (although I don’t think they’d appreciate you throwing stones at it…)

Anyhoo, C4DI provide space for business to start, grow and flourish. For a monthly fee you can get access to a desk, power, a fast (and I mean really fast) network connection and ample coffee.

You are also surrounded by like minded folks, and so there is tremendous scope for mentoring and collaboration. Jon Moss, one of the folks behind the project, will be coming up to the university to talk about what they are doing as part of our Rather Useful Seminar series next semester. They have some amazing plans for the future.

Peter and I went down to C4DI to talk about taking part in session about 3D printing that we hope to set up in a month or so. While we there we sat in on a Skype call with Brendan Dawes, which was very illuminating. I know what I want to do when I grow up now….

My view of the call

Brendon takes stuff, fiddles with it to find out what it can do and then uses it to make interesting things. I sometimes build things “for no reason” or to see what they do, and I love the idea of being able to do that for real.  He has been doing some neat things with Electric Imp devices. I saw these a while back but the cloud based model that underpins them worried me a bit as I’ve bought a couple of devices (Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit) that turned into paperweights when their supporting companies went bust. However, if you think of them as a bit of fun you can have for less than the price of a video game, they start to get a lot more interesting.

I’m going to get one or two to play with when I get some free time. And I’ve paid for the new washing machine that I seem to need…