Samsung Series 7 Slate Upgrade

Malteser powered programming at Three Thing Game..

I’m still liking my Samsung Series 7 Slate a lot. I’ve had Windows 8 on it for a while now and most of the time it works great. The only problems that I’ve had have been related to the discovery of devices when docking and undocking. The operating system really doesn’t like surprises, particularly when it wakes up from being asleep. I've discovered that if I make sure the operating system is awake before putting it in and out of the docking station it seems to detect and load the new devices quite successfully. If I do this with the machine powered down results are less satisfactory, with USB drivers falling over and needing to be disabled and enabled before I can use the keyboard and mouse.

Me being me, and paranoid about damaging the machine through powering it wrongly, I make sure that the dock is powered off when I plug the machine in and out of it. There have been some reports of people damaging their machines if the dock is live when the slate is plugged into it. I’ve no idea if this is a common problem, but I’m playing safe out of cowardice.

The good news, at least I hope it is good news, is that Samsung have released a whole slew of driver updates for the Slate. These include new drivers for the graphics and the motherboard, along with a whole new BIOS. You can find them here, just get hold of the Download SW Update link on this page, extract the upgrade application and run it.

The upgrade application worked fine for me, although the BIOS update didn’t end well because after it my machine failed to boot, ending up stuck at the BIOS configuration screen. If you get this, find your way to the setting involving Boot options and disable the legacy boot option so that the UEFI Boot Support is enabled again. This seems to have been set back to a default during the upgrade process.

You can move around the BIOS screen using the buttons on the slate, but this will drive you completely nuts, so plug a USB keyboard into the machine and use that to set it up. Once I’d done the change my machine rebooted fine. I’ve not really had a chance to test out the docking behaviour, but at least I’ve not gone backwards by upgrading. I’ll post an update if I find out more.

I did all this just before my 9:15 lecture. It is a matter of personal pride (although I’m not really that proud of it in some ways) that i had the machine back working before I had to go and talk. Oh, and I have a spare machine too. Just in case….

Rather Useful Seminar this Wednesday

We will be doing our next Rather Useful Seminar on the 31st of October on the subject of publishing and legality. Rob Singhe from the University Knowledge Exchange and Rob Penrose from Andrew Jacksons Solicitors will be joining me, Rob Miles in the Robert Blackburn Building. (Can you see a pattern forming here?)

More Robs than you can shake a stick at will be talking about the nature of copyright, steps you can take to help make sure that what you thought of stays yours, and Rather Useful things to consider when you get together, form a little group (which is probably really a company) and start selling your wares via App Store or Marketplace.

The session will be at the usual time and place, 1:15 pm Wednesday 31st October in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building. Teams from Three Thing Game who are thinking about selling what they have made are strongly advised to come along and take part.

Three Thing Game Judging

I got back into the university around 7:15 this morning. I always feel terribly guilty about not staying the night but I did try it once and it really did not end well. All of the teams still there (we had lost a few by now) had stuff that worked and things to play. All the teams had made massive amounts of progress overnight, particularly some of the ones from the first year who only started with XNA this week. I’m just so impressed by what you have done from that starting point. Kudos.

I formed the judges into four teams who went around scoring. We also had four camera operators who captured the presentations on video. I’ll be cutting these presentations into a show reel later. I’m going to use some of the game music from the competition as a soundtrack. There was some ace stuff.

Each team of judges then picked their top two entries, who went forward into the final rounds. These lucky folks got to present their solutions to the audience.

Lee shows one of the T shirts, in front you can seen the prizes that we have this year. All good stuff, although I'm not sure about that shade of green to be honest...

The survivors….

This is ‘Three Game’O’Holics’, the first presenters, preparing to show off their game inspired by “Fighting, Desk, in a Dress”. This was an impressive take on the bouncy platform style game with a killer two player mode.

This is ‘No Method, No Class’. I got emails from these guys a week ago asking if I could hook them up with a team. They picked a name much better than the one I suggested and then went on to make a top eight game from “Caffeine, Monkey, under attack”. The gameplay and sound-effects were top notch, as waves of monkeys came in for the kill. The Caffeine High mode was just excellent.

If you want to get ahead, get a hat. Seemed to work for “Did you mean ‘Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?’” who had built a frantic space shooter game from “Fighting Toast Party”.  They had random levels, fantastic zooming viewpoints, swarms of enemies and a real “just one one more try” style of gameplay.

Next up was ‘Sheerware Games’ showing off their Hyper Morph Windows Phone game, made from "Flying, Bombs, Tank". This had lashings of retro style, frantic shooting action and swarms of baddies to be despatched.

The Honeybadger crew took Ninja, mountains, defence and crafted an atmospheric game with invaders storming your castle and you letting loose with ninja inspired weaponry to see them off. With sunset powered game progression and lovely artwork this was a smashing phone game.

I reckon ‘Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway’ is the best team name, although I have no idea what it really means. Their pun heavy title, “Spray of Duty Modern Warbear” was built on “Poptart, deodorant, teddy bear” and had a lone Teddy soldier using his deodorant to save off increasing numbers of invading poptarts of various flavours. With lovely shader powered plasma effects this looked superb.

Its rare to see all of the Battle Brothers looking happy at the same time, but they certainly were pleased to make top eight. They had created an astonishing looking space warfare game from the starting point of “Pirate, ship, spoon”. This had great 3D graphics and a space opera plot involving spoon based pirate contraband . Of course.

I could think of around twenty reasons why the game from ‘The Infamous Two Sirs’ would just not work. This had the most ambitious setup I've ever seen in a Three Thing Game. From the words “Goldfish, Plughole and Invasion” the team crafted a multi-player game experience involving a battle between Kinect controlled angler fish and Windows Phone powered goldfish. Everything worked. Wave your arms to move your angler fish and they dance around the phone screen. Marshal your goldfish on the phone and the player on the Kinect sees tasty goldfish coming into range....

As the judges left for their deliberations I thought to myself just how happy I was to not be in their shoes. But, after a lot of deliberation they managed to come up with a top three. Here they are in reverse order.

Third place went to Battle Brothers. Well done folks. And to think that the textures were designed by someone who had never done them before this competition. Amazing.

Honeybadger Productions clutching their Kinect sensor prizes. Well deserved and a game with great potential.

Sheerware get the big prize. Richly deserved and hard earned. The sheer (sorry) attention to detail in the game and the way it looked Marketplace Ready was very impressive.

Final prize of the day was the Peoples Choice Award. It was great to see the teams showing off their entries to each other. We got the scores off Survey Monkey and the voice of the people agreed with our judges, awarding Sheerware the prize.

Three Thing Game serves as a reminder to me why I love my job so much. The whole thing was just splendid. Special shout outs to Dave G. for fantastic lab support, Peter, David P, Martin, Simon, Mark, Kevin, Warren and Adam for all playing their parts in making this the best TTG we have ever had. Thanks also to Lee and David from Microsoft and Dean and Dominique from MonoGame for judging and giving the competition industry chops. And thanks to the students for turning up and being so gosh darned awesome. I hope you all got as much out of the occasion as I did. And we now all look forward to the next event…

Three Thing Game Day 1

This is the traditional “before” shot. We’ll see how many people are still smiling when we get to “after”.

Three Thing Game is something of an institution at our institution. If you see what I mean. Every one is slightly different, but all of them are a bit bonkers, in the nicest possible way. Some things stay the same: Three Things to base the game on, Four students in a team, 24 hours overnight to deliver.. but we like to ring the odd change here and there. The last couple of events we’ve held auctions for the “things” that will be the basis of the games. Next time, who knows.

Anyhoo, we started today at 11:00 with “masses’o’hardware” turning up in the Fenner Lab, along with loads of “keen to go through the mill” students. There is always a frantic couple of hours while things settle down, network addresses are assigned and multiple monitors adjusted appropriately. This time we also had expertise in the form of Dave Brown and Lee Stott from Microsoft and Dean Ellis and Dominique Louis from the Monogame team. I did a quick XNA lecture early in the afternoon and then the Microsoft and Monogame team took centre stage to describe the opportunities coming over the horizon with Windows 8 and MonoGame.

Apparently last week Microsoft launched a new operating system. I was quite surprised to find this out, you’d have thought there would have been something about it in the papers…. All joking aside (ho ho) I’ve been using Windows 8 for a while now. I’ve found it stable, useful and remarkably like Windows 7. It has changed the way I work for the better. Programs are now launched in seconds with a few key presses, rather than a hunt through folders. I’ve used the Metro style user interface a bit, but I really want to see it on a platform it was built for (for example Surface).

Anyhoo, the rules of the game for Windows 8 applications have changed. Good News: You can now sell applications for Windows 8 just like you can for Windows Phone. Bad News: The Windows 8 Metro Style user interface does not encompass the XNA that we know and love. Better News: You can use MonoGame, to create XNA applications that are Windows 8 Store compliant. Even Better News: MonoGame versions of your program can also be ported onto Android, iPhone, PS Vita and even the Raspberry Pi (coming soon).

Lee from Microsoft set out how Windows 8 can make your programs more interesting and marketable and then Dean and Dominique showed how easy it is to port an existing XNA game to the MonoGame framework. If you are an XNA developer you must, must, must, be looking at MonoGame. I reckon it is the future of XNA, and I’m jolly pleased to see it there, in such good health.

Once we’d had the presentations the development got going in earnest. I of course staggered around with the big camera and took a whole bunch of pictures which have found their way on to Flickr if you want to see all of them.

These guys are “Haribo Hardened”….

That should be enough keyboards...

These guys are so reading the right books...

None of these smiles are forced. For sure.

Lee and the Microsoft crew getting down with the Sheergame team.

We ordered 45 pizzas. And they all got eaten.

I staggered home around 10:45 leaving Martin and Simon to run the night shift. Judging tomorrow morning. Looking forward to it.

Three Thing Game Prep

The picture is nothing much to do with Three Thing Game, but it is rather a nice one.

I spent half an hour today (and pretty much my entire photocopying allowance) printing out briefing documents and marking sheets for Three Thing Game tomorrow and Sunday. I’m not sure about much else, but we aren’t going to be short of paperwork…..