Cheap Travel

I'm not actually branching out as a travel agent, but I do have a couple of cheap tickets for a day in London for anyone living in Hull. The day in question is next Saturday, 1st March. If you and a friend fancy a day trip to the big city, along with Travelcard for the tube, for the knock down price of 35 quid the lot (a substantial saving on what I paid incidentally) get in touch.

Update on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 09:26AM by Rob

The tickets have been taken.

A Mean Knight in Shining Armour

At 6:00 this morning I was sitting in the departure lounge (4:00am start - what joy). The girl sat opposite me was in a bit of a tizzy. Her iPhone had locked up and she asked if she could use my phone to make a local call. Being the kind generous soul that I am I said I'd rather not, because my free minutes don't work that well in the USA, in fact I get seriously gouged whether I make or receive calls (which made those two phone calls on Tuesday at 4:00 am unwelcome for a multitude of reasons).  Fortunately for her an American sat next to me was better placed to help, but I sat there feeling a right heel for not helping.

Anyhoo, it occurred to me that my best course of action was to solve the problem itself so I asked if I could see the defunct device.  It was stuck on an SMS send screen.  She reckoned that she had already tried to reset it but I'm made of sterner stuff. It turns out that if you hold down the menu and power buttons for long enough the device will actually shut down so that you can restart it. I wish I'd thought of doing that before I looked mean.

Night Views

Warren and John's hotel faces in a much nicer direction than mine. And they have a balcony. Cue Rob turning up with a tripod and a winning smile.

Straight out from the balcony

Looking towards the bay

XNA on Zune for Mobile Gameplay

I wish Microsoft sold Zune in Europe. The Zune does what an iPod does, but better. The screen is bigger and it has network sync, so that you can get content, including recorded TV, off your media PC and into your pocket with no wires.

Playing a game on a Zune

And soon you will be able to write and play XNA games on it. Wonderful. The thrust at the moment is for developers, you will use the next version of XNA Game Studio, 3.0, to compile and deploy the programs.

The Zune uses a version of the .NET Compact Framework, just like the Xbox 360, and you get all the neat debugging support that you have on that platform. You also get a very healthy 16MB of program memory for your code to stretch its' legs in, which on a portable device like this is an incredible amount of space.  It even works on all the Zune platforms, including the tiny diskless ones and you also get access to the media the Zune holds. You can even get information from the audio signal, so that you can create programs that respond to the beat in the songs.

I found all this out at the second XNA session of the day. They had a bunch of Zunes running a bunch of games. Of course, given the hardware constraints of the Zune device, we are not talking about huge, 3D first person shooters here, only the 2D parts of XNA are supported, but it does mean you could take the same game code and run it on PC, Xbox or mobile devices. Your games can even make use of the networking support built into Zune, so that you can create wireless games.

The first version of Game Studio 3.0 will be out in April, with the release version by the end of the year. The XNA team have been very good at keeping to their release dates, and I'm really looking forward to seeing this come out.

XNA Community - Now we can all play

After lunch we had the first of two presentations that aimed to put meat on the bones of the keynote announcements yesterday. This dealt with how you will get your XNA game up onto Xbox Live Arcade so that anyone in the world can play with it.

The process is going to be community driven, with developers performing peer reviews of the content that has been submitted. Once a few of reviewers have taken a turn with your game and agreed with your game description it goes out there for the masses to play with. There is a very precise rating system, so that particular aspects of the game can be identified as "adult". There are very powerful tools available to shut down a naughty game and ban the creator, and so I think that in the situation Microsoft have made the best of a very bad job.

It would have been much simpler for them to just say "this is too scary" and walk (or perhaps run) away from the whole thing. When YouTube started up they were a comparatively small operation with nothing much to lose. They didn't have time to police their content and so nowadays you can find pretty much any kind of material up there. Microsoft are trying to do the same with games, but being a much bigger target they would be in trouble if they got this wrong. The fact that they are trying to build a workable, scaleable system to manage the content is hugely impressive. They freely admit that they don't quite know how it will turn out and some aspects of policy are not clear yet. Three things stood out for me:

1. It is going to happen, you will be able to get your XNA games out to a potential audience of 10 Million Xbox owners.
2. You keep ownership of the game you submit. Microsoft just provides a channel for the distribution.
3. This is going to create a new ecosystem of people who gain respect and a role simply as trusted game reviewers who tell it like it is. Even if you don't write games, you could still make quite a name for yourself just doing this side.

The service goes live in the USA later this year for testing, with full roll out across the 'states by Christmas. Not sure when we will get it in the UK, but I'm looking forward to it.