What Price Loyalty?

I was in Waterstones yesterday buying a couple of books. When I paid for them the person at the till asked me if I had a Waterstones "Loyalty Card". I said no and paid up. As I left the shop I began to worry about this.

Was it disloyal not to get a loyalty card? When you get one, do you have to swear an oath? If you get one of the cards and then buy a book from Amazon, do they mind? Can you get stripped of your card for such transgressions? Do they have loyalty police?

I think I had a near escape there...

Copyright, what copyright?

I got this last week at Hornsea Market. Actually works very well, and definitely not a shameless ripoff of another toy with a boys name. Oh no.

I Love Autumn

I really like this time of year. I like it when the nights get that bit longer and there is a bit of a chill in the air. I've been wondering about why I like September so much, and I reckon that I've figured it out.

The students come back on Monday, including a whole new bunch of First Years. It means I'll be knee deep in lectures, labs and tutorials. Great stuff.

If you are reading this and coming to Hull for the first time as an undergraduate it will be nice to see you, and make sure that you come along to the welcome do on Thursday evening . We are going to have big screen Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero, along with a PS3 and other bits and bobs, free food, beer tokens and a silly quiz with impossible questions. And a prize (which I really must sort out).

Update on Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 05:19PM by Rob

If you have any real stinkers of questions you'd like to inflict on hapless first years and masters students, feel free to send them through and I'll give you a namecheck if I actually use your question..... 

Untamed Workforce

Microsoft has put up quite a funny spoof web site to showcase mobile working:

http://www.untamedworkforce.org/

It is quite neat, but the links drop you onto the Windows Mobile web site, which kind of gives the game away.

However, I was very pleased to find that the best of these sites (in my opinion) is still live. If you've not seen "Escape from Yesterworld" before, it is quite a treat. I especially like the videos:

http://www.escapeyesterworld.com/

XNA Bits and Bobs, and the power of XACT

I've added a new section to the XNA Book part. This is where I put all the little things that I've found out about XNA development. I've discovered a couple of things about using XACT which you might find useful. They are here.

On the subject of XACT (the program that you use to create audio content for XNA games) I've gone from mild loathing to strong affection. Sort of a love affair, but with wavebanks. It lets you do really nice things with your samples, so that you can create complex sound stages with only a few wave files. It will change playback settings each time it plays the same waveform, to make a single sample sound like hundreds of different ones. It will randomly select a sample from a range, so that you get a nice variation in sounds. It will even let you bind variables in your program to settings used for playback, so that the sound can get louder on the left when the spaceship moves to the left.

So far I've only really scratched the surface of the tool (which is all I'll have time to do in the book) but if you want a nice way to add sound to games you should take a look. It is free, supplied as part of the XNA 2.0 developers kit.