October 3rd, 2008
It would seem that from 9am onwards, Nigel Barlow is taking every lecture and practical of my day.
Something I spotted in his second session (but only lecture of the day) was the reference to “Computers which don’t look like computers?” links that go to miniature computer motherboard PCBs that run some form of inbuilt operating system. I’d say something like this could have a lot of potential for the games module should we want to build some form of physical installation.
The examples given were Gumstix and Colibri Modules.
Uploads
I’ve also managed to upload a few more images of times gone onto Flickr. Generally they’re heading for the Traditional Artwork set.
September 28th, 2008
So I’ve been playing through the current Half Life 2 series backwards, starting with Episode 2 and going back to the original. It is interesting to do this because you get to observe the subtle changes made to the overall visual quality of the game as DirectX and graphics card capabilities have improved.
But let’s face it, the original was so good the changes are pretty hard to spot so really all I was doing was enjoying a bit of classic gaming before heading back to university. But when I reached the Grab-the-Gravity-Gun and head for “Don’t go through Ra…” Ravenholm point, having completely played Episode 2 using mostly the Gravity Gun as a killing machine thanks to the Hunter’s resistance to bullets, I decided that keeping hold of Dog’s rollermine toy ball would be a fun experiment.
And what a BRILLIANT option it is!
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September 7th, 2008
Thought I’d throw in a couple of screenshots I’ve taken of TES4 Oblivion. I absolutely enjoyed playing it the first time around, and it had a similar wow factor to the extent of when I first tried out Half Life 2. Once I’d got as much out of the fighting and looting aspect I turned to simply exploring the absolutely vast landscape and admiring the scenery.
(Vilverin is one of the first sights a player gets emerging from the prison/sewer tunnel at the start of the game.)
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June 17th, 2007
Now that my PC isn’t critical to my activities, I decided to give Windows Vista a go. I started off by buying a simple new SATA harddisk, which should have been exceptionally easy to install until I discovered that it came supplied with the disk and an engrish manual/2-by-4 sheet of paper with nonsense-instructions printed, and absolutely nothing else. Because I have SATA cables and jumper pins growing in magical pots ten to the dozen here it was fine…
Actually what this really meant was I had to go on an unnecessary search for these things but eventually all was fine and I had a third HDD within my PC. I attempted to install Vista on the new disk while disconnecting the old ones so as to preserve my XP setup but something in the BIOS didn’t like this, and it ended up not detecting the SATA drive.
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January 8th, 2007
Introduction to AI
This module actually looks like hell of a breath of fresh air compared to recent drudging through essays and programming. Taught by Plymouth’s professor of AI, Angelo Cangelosi.
Essay
Using a touch sensitive screen to select an area to zoom to within my camera interface.
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.