Suteka's Favourite Cereal

After a long break (holidays are great!) I started work on Zatacka again, this time ensuring it works on Xbox 360 (if you have a Creator’s Club Subscription and would like to get hold of it, feel free to contact me!) which required a large rewrite. Anyway, here it is now with more consistent collision detection.  As always, please make sure the XNA Framework 2.0 Redistributable is installed.

I’ve finished a beta version of Zatacka. Grab it and give it a try. Let me know what you think. Install the included XNA Framework 2.0 first.

Zatacka Install

*UPDATE*  Uploaded new beta. Make sure to uninstall the old one BEFORE installing the new one. See changelog for details

Finally, some time to program. What a relief. Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express 2.0 was released in beta form a few days ago, so I’ve ported my work to the new framework. The game is very close to beta stage, with only a few menu screens missing. The menu is an (incomplete) adaptation of the example given at the XNA Creators Club Website.

Blue Dragon. Love it or hate it, it’s a bad game. It’s got a weak story, music that is far from the best work of Nobuo Uematsu, and framerate issues that piss the hell out of everyoen. Still. It’s a Japanese RPG. On Xbox. And that’s gotta count for something, right? Well not for very long. Luckily there is a deluge (ok, maybe just a light drizzle) of J-RPGs coming up for the Xbox (starting with the beautiful Eternal Sonata pretty darn soon and ending off with Lost Odyssey early next year) so it looks like Blue Dragon will go the way of so many other mediocre games and be forgotten not a moment too soon.

I’ve written an essay on quantum computing. It’s not great but there’s a lot of content in it. If you’re interested in quantum computers I suggest you also have a look at the references at the end of the essay. Note you should understand some quantum mechanics or at least Hilbert spaces before attempting to read this, or it will all seem like nonsense. One, Zero and So Much More

I’ve been working on a version fo Zatacka for my Nintendo DS. I’m not 100% sure what the controls will be but I’d definitely like to integrate the touch screen, even if only for specials/powerups and so one. The part I’m really looking forward to: playing against other players over wifi, and perhaps even through the internet. That may take some time though. Homebrew Nintendo DS libraries are still in their infancy but exciting developments are occurring all the time! Can’t keep a good hacker down.

So the hype has really started. Halo 3 seems to be the biggest videogame launch ever by quite some distance. It’s certainly the first time I’ve seen Microsoft put up Xbox related advertising in my university. Odd. I never really caught on to the whole Master Chief saga. Perhaps this one will be different. But with so many other games (and so much to do in REAL LIFE as well) I think I’ll give it a miss, although by the sound of it, I’m the only one: Preorders for Halo 3 surpassed 1 million some time ago. At 60 per game that’s over 60 Million revenue straight away. Not bad for a first person shooter Considering developing costs are around $20 million, that’s a pretty nice profit straight off. No wonder there’s a spinoff in the works.

I’ve been hard at work procrastinating. Today a friend showed me an archaic game called Zatacka, which is an open source clone of the DOS game "Achtung, Die Kurve". It’s a really great game (although it’s strictly multiplayer…) and I decided to give it a bit of an update so to speak. At the moment I’m working on an XNA version that will eventually run on both Windows PCs and the Xbox 360. Of course, numerous improvements and special features will be added but for now I’ve just recreated the good old look and feel.

UPDATE: Here’s an idea of what I’ve done so far. Bloom shaders are used to give it that nice neon look and I have a few effects up my sleeve I’ll implement soon…

I recently (OK, not that recently…my birthday was a few months back) got given this CD from one of my friends. I’ve heard most of the tracks before and have actually played two of them (not that well mind you) but Nicholas Angelich manages to capture the message of each of these miniatures beautifully. You can listen to samples of each track on the Amazon website. My personal favourites are the itermezzi, Op. 117.

As I’m sure you’ve read, the Xbox 360 is a poor excuse for a device. It’s noisy, it overheats, it breaks. Always. But still. I think mine is somehow special. sure it breaks. A lot. But it fixes itself nicely. On encountering the so called “Red Ring of Death”: basically, the GPU heats up so much that it de-solders itself from the mainboard. Great manufacturing scheme there. It turns out that in an effort to shave off roughly 0.50 from the cost of a 400 dollar machine. Microsoft chose to use a generic low quality thermal compound on the GPU/heatsink interface, instead of something like Arctic Silver which according to tests would have fixed the majority of these issues. Anyway, the one crazy fix that I read about on the net was the “Towel Technique”. Basically, you wrap the Xbox snugly in a warm towel so that there is no air flow, turn it on and leave to bake for 10-15 min (or until golden brown). During this process, the GPU heats up so much that the solder melts (again) and it re-solders itself to the board. Magic. Sounds like a crackpot theory. Except it actually works. I tried it a couple of months back and it kept me going until last Saturday. During this period I was sure to keep the box well ventilated and even sprung for a new (quieter but more efficient) exhaust fan. But then it hit again. Hard. This time I was prepared though. It didn’t work the first time. Or the second time. But the third worked like a charm (although I did use two towels this time…) So now it’s up and running again, in time for Blue Dragon! Hurray.