The Most Complicated Game I’ve Ever Played

Tonight we had a go at “The Most Complicated Game I’ve Ever Played”. It’s called “High Frontier” and boy is there a lot going on. The aim of the game is to colonise space, build up your fleet, explore planets and asteroids and boldly….. Well, you know the rest.

The board is full of incredibly detailed descriptions of places to try and reach using rockets which you need to carefully provision and fuel if you are going to get anywhere. I think it would take a day to play it properly, we only really managed to scratch the surface of the gameplay. But I did manage to colonise Mars, which I’m rather pleased about. The game is packed with proper science about space exploration, and much of the gameplay is really a simulation of the things you’d need to do if you really wanted to explore space. Great fun.

Pi Arcade Table Complete but Flawed

This isn’t a great picture, in more ways than one.

Today we put the finishing touches to the Pi Arcade table that I’ve been building. It was just a matter of fitting the wiring for the switches, fitting the Pi and then dropping the monitor into the slot. And finding out that it doesn’t work quite as well as I would like. The problem is not with the Pi, or the software, or the controls, or even the cardboard table top. The problem is with the monitor. Although the picture is good and the device runs cool thanks to its LED backlight, it doesn’t have the angle of view that you need to have if you want to sit and use the table as it is supposed to be used. You can see it in the photograph above. The bands at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be black and yet, from the angle of view that we have they look grey. The fact that most of the games that I want to play are on black backgrounds doesn’t help either so, while this is not a glorious failure, it is not quite the glorious success that I was after.

But it is of course not the end. Since I bought my monitor the price of IPS monitors (which use a better pixel switching technology) has dropped quite a bit. I’m going to put my LED monitor out there for sale (any takers?) and see what difference I get with one of those.

I guess you’d call this “integration testing”…

Hull Platform Expo Meeting

I was invited to a Platform Expo meeting in Hull today. One way to make an entrance is to arrive late and then sit right at the front. So I did. Chairing the meeting was Alan Johnson, Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle. The meeting was all about Platform Expo, an on-going effort to put Hull on the digital map. Now, I’m on record as not liking meetings much. But this one was different. Everyone was pointed in the direction. And every one added value to the effort.

We’ve got some great plans for the future, I’m looking forward to getting involved with them. If you are Hull student, all I can say at the moment is that there are some interesting things coming down the tracks….

On the way out I saw quite a nice sunset over the quayside.

Windows Phone 8 SDK Now Out

Along with the release of Windows Phone 8, the Windows Phone 8 SDK is now available for free download. You can get it from here. With this you can create applications for the new Windows 8 devices and use lots of yummy new features. And they are yummy. I’m using a couple of them in a “groundbreaking new application” that I’m working on in top secret. It’s so secret that I’m only allowing myself to see every other character of the code. And no, the groundbreaking part is not that you can use it as a shovel.

Mild health warning.

You will need Windows 8 64 bit version to run the Windows Phone 8 SDK. Since the phone actually runs bits of Windows 8 this is quite understandable. The emulator also requires a processor that provides Second Level Address Translation or SLAT. No, I’ve no idea what that really means either, but I’m happy to nod and smile whenever it is mentioned. The bottom line is that if you have a processor with an i in the name, for example i3, i5 or i7 then you will be fine. If you have an older processor this might mean that you can’t run the emulator. You’ll also need to enable Hyper-V on your system, which sounds like something Captain Kirk would ask for, but actually is to do with the processor virtualisation that is now used for proper emulation. Of course, if all this fails you should be able to deploy and debug inside that Lumia 920 you are going to rush out and buy (but not before I’ve got mine). There is help on the download site about all this. There are also versions for Windows 7.1 development. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some downloading to do…

Microsoft Surface First Impressions

I call this composition “Surface and Space Cheese Battle”.

When the doorbell rings at 8:30 pm on the 30th of October you feel a certain trepidation about answering it. Particularly as we haven’t got any sweets in the house for Halloween yet. Sending kids away with a bread roll and a few length’s of spaghetti is probably not going to end well. Anyhoo, it wasn’t trick or treat, it was a harassed looking delivery chap with my Microsoft Surface. They promised delivery by the 30th of October and they just made it. By three and a half hours. I’m not that bothered about the delay to be honest, they did give me fifty quid to spend in the Surface hardware store to say sorry for not having the machine to me on Friday. I put it towards a “type Cover”, although I think I may have slightly wasted my money, as we shall see later.  I’ve been playing with the Surface now for a couple of hours and so of course I feel totally qualified to write a complete, in-depth, review of the device. So here goes.

It works. It’s different from the iPad. I think I get what it is for, and I really like it. I love my iPad like I love my TV. It lets me consume stuff that other people have made. But try and produce something other than finger paintings or music and the iPad falls apart. I remember my bitter disappointment when I tried to use the iPad Pages word processor, with its much touted “Office Capability”, to make a document. I suppose I should have realised something was up when I discovered the price of Pages was much, much less than the equivalent component in Microsoft office. I didn’t actually want much, just a table in the middle of some text, but the way it went wrong was just horrible. And as for printing from the iPad, just don’t go there. Really.

The Surface has proper Microsoft Office built in. Proper. And it integrates with Skydrive directly. All the documents that I’ve put into the cloud are ready and waiting to be worked with. As for printing, it just saw the printers in my Homegroup right out of the box. The only slight bugbear is the lack of the Outlook component. I spent a futile thirty minutes trying to get the Surface Mail client to connect to the university email server before I discovered that the university email was down at the time. Now it is working OK the built in email application looks OK, but I do like Outlook.

I ordered the Surface without any great plans for it. My main aim was to have a test platform for any Metro style things that I might fancy writing. But it turns out to be much better than that. The tight integration with my documents means that it will now be my weapon of choice whenever I go away. And the micro-SD slot means that I can load it up with 64G of movies and anything I fancy when I go.

I got the touch keyboard cover with the device. This provides a cover and a keyboard at the same time. The magnetic attachment is extremely strong and positive and it wraps around the device very nicely.The word on the street about the touch keyboard was that it was OK, but took a while to get used to. I think this is wrong. It works very well right away. I’ve ordered the type cover too, as I do like having keys that move when you hit them, but I’d be quite happy to use the touch keyboard to knock out large documents. It is in a different league to typing on the screen, which is something I’ve never enjoyed doing.

Hardware wise the Surface is very nice. The black metal finish is very swish, although it does seem to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet. I can never understand why hardware makers don’t think about this a bit harder when they make these devices. Nothing makes a device look old and worn like a covering of smeary fingerprints. The standard of construction, and of the presentation in the box is very impressive. The power supply is larger than you might expect and even has a fuse in the plug. It puts out a fairly meaty amount of current and seems to be able to charge the machine pretty quickly. The effect is spoiled a bit by the label on the Power Supply itself, which looks like it was stuck on as an afterthought, and the magnetic coupling for the power connector is nowhere near as positive or strong as the one for the keyboard, which is sad.

The weirdest thing about the Surface is that if you put it alongside my Samsung Slate and asked folks to spot the Windows RT device, they’d have a hard time telling them apart at first. I wasn’t expecting a full desktop, much less a command prompt. And I can plug in memory cards and stuff using the USB adapter and they seem to just appear and work as usual. Of course the illusion breaks whenever you start looking for programs to run. The Surface will only run programs that have been created for Windows 8 RT, which is the version specially crafted for the ARM chip inside it. At the moment this is restricted to applications from the marketplace, of which there is not a huge number. Hopefully the future will bring a few more programs, I’m looking for a good image editor which supports raw camera files and a Metablogger poster (Live Writer would be perfect) and I’ll be a very happy bunny.

I said to myself when I ordered the Surface that I’d be selling the iPad once it arrived. Then I said “Yeah, right…”. But now I’m thinking I might be filling out forms on ebay after all. The way I work, I seem to spend much more time making stuff than I do consuming it. I actually enjoy writing things. Perhaps my favourite game program is Microsoft Word. If that’s true of you too, then you will love the Surface.