Monquixote

The new Tonerider alnico IV classic pickup arrived at the end of last week. They were described as "Black White Zebra" so I was hoping the light coil would be white, but it ended up being the usual cream colour which was a bit annoying. I could have sent it back, but I was far too excited.

The plan was to try just the bridge PU and see how it goes before buying the neck. In some ways it seems crazy to replace the Wilkinsons with Toneriders as they RRP at £50 to the Toneriders £35.

I stuck them in over the weekend:

All the tools in place:

The control cavity turned out to be a bit busier than I was expecting.

I was initially a bit puzzled how it worked but then worked out that the pickup cables were spliced onto a grey cable that headed off to the pickup switch on the scratchplate. The volume pot was another solder Malteser so I decided as I was doing one wire as a splice I would do them both that way.

Pickup installed!

I put the old strings back on as I figured I would be taking them off soon to change the neck one. First impressions are very good. The Tonerider sounds very different to the Wilkinson. Loads brighter which was one of the things I was really looking for as the current one is a little too dark for strumming. The broad tonal difference means they don't blend all that well so another pickup was required in short order. I decided on an Iron Gear Alchemist humbucker sized P90. The only reason for using this over the Tonerider Rebel 90 was that the Rebel was out of stock at the time.

It shipped today so I'll post some comparison clips when everything is installed. Including the Axetec strings which cost a staggering £2.60 a set!

Fret King Vs Tonerider (Vs Iron Gear) - Part 2

2011-06-20T23:18:00.001+01:00

The plan was to try just the bridge PU and see how it goes before buying the neck. In some ways it seems crazy to replace the Wilkinsons with Toneriders as they RRP at £50 to the Toneriders £35.

I stuck them in over the weekend:

All the tools in place:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-kviaoQ8wwp8/Tf-2M85Lc_I/AAAAAAAAACg/IjT-mP51cAQ/s640/2011-06-18%25252013.39.35.jpg

The control cavity turned out to be a bit busier than I was expecting.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C0eKg_UmBjo/Tf-2WS66BXI/AAAAAAAAAC8/qGczDUwpmlI/s400/2011-06-18%25252013.41.55.jpg

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dTl2xrV3pqs/Tf-2rrhxkdI/AAAAAAAAADQ/wGwsaapEDZ8/s400/2011-06-18%25252017.34.04.jpg

Pickup installed!

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mHfCRlYQdOg/Tf-20ABDnNI/AAAAAAAAADU/NYC84wOLJ8A/s400/2011-06-18%25252017.34.30.jpg

It shipped today so I'll post some comparison clips when everything is installed. Including the Axetec strings which cost a staggering £2.60 a set!

Fret King Vs Tonerider (Vs Iron Gear) - Part 2

2011-06-20T23:16:00.001+01:00

The plan was to try just the bridge PU and see how it goes before buying the neck. In some ways it seems crazy to replace the Wilkinsons with Toneriders as they RRP at £50 to the Toneriders £35.

I stuck them in over the weekend:

All the tools in place:

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-kviaoQ8wwp8/Tf-2M85Lc_I/AAAAAAAAACg/IjT-mP51cAQ/s640/2011-06-18%25252013.39.35.jpg

The control cavity turned out to be a bit busier than I was expecting.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C0eKg_UmBjo/Tf-2WS66BXI/AAAAAAAAAC8/qGczDUwpmlI/s400/2011-06-18%25252013.41.55.jpg

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dTl2xrV3pqs/Tf-2rrhxkdI/AAAAAAAAADQ/wGwsaapEDZ8/s400/2011-06-18%25252017.34.04.jpg

Pickup installed!

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mHfCRlYQdOg/Tf-20ABDnNI/AAAAAAAAADU/NYC84wOLJ8A/s400/2011-06-18%25252017.34.30.jpg

It shipped today so I'll post some comparison clips when everything is installed. Including the Axetec strings which cost a staggering £2.60 a set!

Fret King Vs Tonerider (Vs Iron Gear) - Part 2

2011-06-20T23:08:00.001+01:00

The plan was to try just the bridge PU and see how it goes before buying the neck. In some ways it seems crazy to replace the Wilkinsons with Toneriders as they RRP at £50 to the Toneriders £35.

I stuck them in over the weekend:

All the tools in place:

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/XsA6Q7rUzH7rnsIm1FEjK09eV_bQzTkIzuZ6qjVXPE0?feat=directlink

The control cavity turned out to be a bit busier than I was expecting.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/6ZRDk7ByZbve6DckKRsQP09eV_bQzTkIzuZ6qjVXPE0?feat=directlink

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Wz1mCBkbCURndv-_q-NP_E9eV_bQzTkIzuZ6qjVXPE0?feat=directlink

Pickup installed!

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/twdplEmIOpbekOUPV_YcgE9eV_bQzTkIzuZ6qjVXPE0?feat=directlink

It shipped today so I'll post some comparison clips when everything is installed. Including the Axetec strings which cost a staggering £2.60 a set!

Fret King Vs Tonerider - Part 1

2011-06-13T20:56:00.001+01:00

The Iron Gear pickups I added to my Strat were a great success. I was very impressed that Chinese made budget pickups could make a big improvement to a vintage US Strat but indeed they did. There was quite a bit of debate on the sound clips on Music Radar. I preferred the new pickups from the get go but a tweak to the heights and they now sound amazing. I'm never going to go back to spending twice or three times the price on Seymour Duncans.

Since installing the Iron Gears my beloved Fret King has started to sound somewhat ordinary in comparison so I started planning my next pickup upgrade project. Lots of great advice was forthcoming on the thread I started on Music Radar.

I was torn between getting another set of Iron Gears which I already knew were excellent and trying out the pickups made by Tonerider which had glowing recommendations from a number of people. I already have a Tonerider British Distortion pedal which was great value for money and puts a big grin on my face when ever I use it (seriously check out the clips) so I had no worries about using them or their distributors Dangeberry Music.

To help me decide I sent an e-mail to both companies asking what they would recommend. Both companies replied within a day which is seriously good customer service in my book. Iron Gear recommended the Rolling Mill and Tonerider suggested either the Alnico IV or the Rock Song.

I'm sure I can't go wrong whoever I choose, but as I'd already put some business Iron Gear's way I thought I would take a punt on the Toneriders and ordered an Alnico IV from Dangleberry as I liked the clips on the site bit more.

As they sell them individually I went for just a bridge to see if I like it. Rather than sticking to the nickel covers it came with I've gone for the rather more gauche zebra coils.

As with last time I'll record some before and after sound clips for your delectation and comment.

Book Review - A Drink Before The War by Dennis Lehane

2011-04-30T01:46:00.001+01:00

I bought this book having just seen the amazing film Shutter Island (based on a Lehane novel).
I must say I was extremely disappointed. I am not a regular reader of detective fiction, but even so I found the plot to be nothing more than a sequence of Sam Spade clichés strung together, from the hard drinking Irish American detective stereotype to the over reliance on standard genre tropes (characters being shot moments before revealing a secret etc).
The dialogue is glib and comes across as if the characters know they are in a detective novel and have already read the plot outline. The book clearly wants to make a statement about important issues like race relations, domestic abuse and corruption, but has no idea what it actually wants to say on the subject.
Perhaps worst of all the book breaks the literary golden rule and is pretty much all tell and no show. Vast tracts of exposition take the place of any kind of characterisation or development.
My understanding is that his later books are somewhat better. On this evidence I'm not going to take the time to find out.

Frankenstrat vs Iron Gear - The Installation

2011-04-12T21:31:00.001+01:00

Last weekend the deed was done and I installed my new Iron Gear pickups in my Strat (if you don't know what I'm talking about look here)

I thought I would share some of the photos with you as modifying a vintage guitar already hacked about by previous owners is a slightly different prospect than the brand new guitars that are usually worked on in youtube videos. I decided to go for white pickups as the aged cream coloured pickups most people offer on "aged" guitars look really fake to me and I like to age my own gear.

Here are all my tools laid out ready for the job (There's nothing worse than getting half way through a task and not having what you need)

The first task was removing the strings. My top tip if you have a guitar with a floating bridge is to put a shim under it before you remove the strings so it doesn't fall off the posts.Paying cards work best, but I used a nearby notepad.

My first issue was getting the scratchplate off, one of the screws had rusted solid on the top and required some tweaking with pliers to remove. Once that was sorted off came the scratch plate (Notice the unfaded lake placid blue under the scratchplate).

Only then was the full horror of the hacked about wiring revealed. The new soldering iron was powered on but immediately started emitting loads of white smoke (That's what you get for £6 from Amazon). I figured it was probably burning off some ill advised anti corrosion coating on the metal and left in running in the garden for half an hour after which it was behaving its self. Desoldering is usually a fairly simple task but as you can see in the next photo dodgy repairs left the volume pot with a lump of solder on it the size of a Malteser which my plucky 30W smoke belching soldering iron declined to melt. Eventually after trying until some of the insulation on the wiring started to fry I resorted to hacking it off with a soldering iron.

With the old pickups removed fitting the Iron Gears was fairly painless. They are really well made (better than the Fender USA originals) with single conductor waxed cloth cable and all the vintage goodies. The only issue was that the supplied springs were a little big so rather than cut them down I used the old ones.

With all the pickups in I put the guitar back together and added the two rather jazzy roller string trees as the old ones were getting corroded leading to some tuning problems.

Pleasingly it worked first time once I got the strings back on. I recorded some tone samples before I changed the pickups so for my next post I'm going to give some sound clips so you can judge for yourself if you think it sounds better but I'm very impressed so far.

Frankenstrat Meet Iron Gear

2011-04-05T23:37:00.001+01:00

Let me introduce you to my Frankenstrat.

It was the first decent guitar I owned, bought for the princely sum of £200 back in 1996. I got it cheap because it had been bashed around and modified so much (Now people spend a fortune on fake looking "Relic" guitars). It's been my constant musical companion for 15 years and is probably the only object I would consider running back into burning building for.

It started life as a 1980 USA made Fender "The Strat" (It's a pretty rare model and I once saw a mint one in London for nearly two grand). When I bought it had been fitted with a horrible 80's wang bar and shrill heavy metal pickups.

Over the years it's had:

* replacement Wilkinson bridge

* replacement Seymour Duncan bridge pickup

* Refret

* Locking nut removed and new nut fitted

* All knobs, switches, jack sockets, and pots replaced

It's getting to the point where the only original bits are made of wood. It's a fantastic guitar and it records beautifully, but I've never managed to get the kind of live tone I want out of it as the two original pickups don't tend to cut through in the mix and they blend pretty badly with the replacement bridge pickup.

I'm a big believer in replacement pickups as tone boosters after hearing guitars transformed from muddy junk into tone monsters with the addition of Seymours. I've been thinking about treating myself to some Bare Knuckle pickups for ages as they are supposedly god gift to tone, but never getting around to it as they are so bleeding expensive. Yesterday I came across the Iron Gear website quickly followed by reading huge quantities of rave reviews about them. They are spectacularly well priced and I could buy two whole sets for the price of a single Bare Knuckle.

I've taken the plunge and bought a set of Texas Locos off the back of a 5* review in Guitar Buyer. Sticking to the budget theme in these recession hit times I'm going to be fitting them myself so I've also invested in a soldering iron.

I'm planning to record some tone samples before and after and post them here so you can hear for yourself what the Iron Gears can do for my beloved mutant guitar.

Android Project - Train Game Design

2011-02-20T00:03:00.001Z

I've had a slight pause in my game project due to coming up against my first major design decision namely what is my game actually going to be about.

I've ruled out porting Brick of Destiny and on closer inspection I'm not convinced either of the ideas I mentioned in my initial post are going to work out.

I still stick by my initial assessment that there is absolutely no point in rewriting a classic unless I'm convinced I can do it better than Zynga, Glu or any of the hundreds of well funded casual game devs out there.

I've played and downloaded a lot of Android games and I've come to the conclusion that I don't really like tilt controls. or on screen joysticks for controlling action games which pretty much rules our classic shmups, platformers, or racing games.

I want something that's a natural fit for touch controls, but I still want something that has a proper game loop and gets the heart beating a bit faster.

There's an awful lot of games out there and it's easy to think that all the good games have been done. I've literally kept my self up at night trying to think of an original game idea.

I very nearly considered a remake of a PC game I was a huge fan of called Sheep, but a quick look at the Android market showed that several people have had the same idea.

I had my eureka moment this morning. I've always loved the scene in Wallace & Gromit where Gromit has to lay the tracks out in front of the model train. I briefly thought about making a game where you have to lay tracks in front of a train but I realised this would be nothing more than a remake of Pipe Mania and there are dozens of those out there. I also briefly considered a remake of an old Amstrad game called Locomotion which is a similar concept with a sliding block puzzle twist.

My moment of revelation was thinking about the on rails sections of Mario games where you have to ride along on a moving platform hitting switches to change course and avoid obstacles. This reminded me of the mine cart mini game in the Indiana Jones arcade game (skip to 1:30).

I've had a bit of a rummage around on the Android store and I can't find any decent mine cart, or train based games. I also spent a bit of time searching for flash games (including a site dedicated to train based flash games!?!) and though there are a few games that have a train points mechanic they are usually focussed on managing a station rather than guiding a single train.

So the concept I'm going for is keeping a train running on the tracks.

The screen will contain four parallel tracks the train can be switched from one track to the next by touching junctions on the track thus avoiding various obstacles. I'm a big fan of trying to keep something in a playable build at all times (especially due to my short attention span) so I'll probably knock something out as quickly as possible using horizontally blocks and lines and then add additional game play elements one by one getting rid of them if they don't work. Ideas so far are:

A cutesy cartoon type look possibly with isometric pixel art (I might also try some fixed perspective 3D if I'm feeling brave)
Trains containing bad guys that you have to dispatch by forcing them to run into traps
Obstacles that can't be avoided but have to be fixed for the train to pass by using touch gestures.
Depending on how I end up doing the graphics I may try my hand at a chip tune type sound track with some 8 bit synth action
Rather than have instadeath and multiple lives I'm planning on having train passengers acting as lives who fall out when the train gets hit and can be picked up by driving past stations
It would be really fun to be able to define rules for track layouts that provide a challenge, but are guaranteed completable so I could have the levels procedurally generated rather than defining them by hand
The game should progressively speed up throughout the level possibly with some power ups which allow you to speed up or slow down the train.

I'm glad I've finally got an idea I can start implementing. The next step is throwing some code together and seeing what works.

Review - Blur PS3

2011-02-19T00:13:00.001Z

I received Blur today from Love Film. I had high hopes, but unfortunately it was one of those games that was in the console for about half an hour before it was back in the envelope ready to be posted back.

The concept of the game can be summed up very simply, it's Burnout crossed with Mario Kart (or if you prefer Wipeout with cars). You race around stylised tracks in real cars with arcadey physics whilst picking up various power ups that fling balls of glowing energy into your opponents. The graphics and presentation are very impressive, but ultimately the game just isn't fun.

Combining the two genres of cartoony Kart game and arcade adrenaline racer must have seemed like a winner on paper, but they are fundamentally incompatible genres. In Mario Kart the unrealistic physics of the tiny nimble cars allows you to dodge your opponents shells and makes targeting tricky, but a game like Burnout is all about the feeling of weight. A great arcade racer gives you the impression you are hauling tonnes of protesting steel teetering on the limits of traction moments from disaster. The upshot of this dysfunctional marriage of genres is that in Pure with it's large unwieldy muscle cars it is trivial to hit and virtually impossible to avoid being hit. When 20 cars are participating in a race armed with a near limitless supply of homing missiles and leader zapping lightning you might as well call it blue shell the game.

As is par for the course in such games you start at the back of the pack and have the benefit of being slightly faster than your opponents. Making your way to the front requires little more than not crashing for a couple of laps and once you are there it's simply a matter of luck if you will get zapped on the last corner and end up finishing in 10th place. It's not just that when you fail it feels like a cheap loss you also start to feel that victory is equally random and thus hollow.

Checking Metacritic it looks like Blur got some pretty solid reviews, but I wonder how much that was a result of Activision leaning on the press as by all accounts the game tanked at retail leading to the Bizarre Creations eventual demise last month. My heart goes out to all the guys facing redundancy as you can tell a lot of love went into the making of a game which ultimately doesn't really work. Bizarre will always have a special place in my heart as quite apart from their stand out hits Project Gotham and Geometry Wars the studio's first ever game was The Killing Game Show an Amiga classic which I loved as a kid.

I'll leave you with Bizarre's farewell video montage as a reminder of the great work they've done over the years.

Playstation Plus - A Good Deal?

2011-02-17T22:38:00.001Z

I've not been doing my usual amount of gaming recently. First I got Metroid Other M from Love Film which didn't work because apparently older Wii's stop playing double layer disks.

Then Bioshock 2 arrived, but though I think it's a decent game it didn't really work for me so I took a trip to the Playstation store to see if there was anything worth buying. I've been wondering about the Playstation Plus service for a while, but I've been resisting. There were about half a dozen games I liked the look of and for £11.99 for a 90 day subscription it seemed like a pretty reasonable deal.

The small print is that you don't get to keep the games if you cancel the service, but then there are virtually no games that I'm still playing 90 days down the line so I'm not going to worry about it and I don't let it stop me subscribing to Spotify. I used to sign up for the view that you can resell physical products but having looked into selling my old games on Amazon, most of them seem to only be worth about £5 which isn't much return if you bought a new release for £50.

I'm planning on making a few notes about it over the next few weeks so I can decide if it's worth it when the subscription renewal is due.

One of the things I was most looking forward to playing from the first batch of games was Magician Lord. When I was a kid there was nothing I coveted more than a Neo Geo with Magician Lord, but at £600 for the console and £200 a go for the games it was never going to happen. Having played it I'm glad I didn't part with my hard earned cash back in the day because it turns out it's unreasonably hard and not all that much fun. Lets hope they put King of Monsters, Bust a Move, or King of Fighters on there soon as they are the pick of SNK bunch.

Of the games I've played so far Shattered is the game that I most enjoyed. It's a superb HD remake of Breakout (you know I have a soft spot for these types of games as I wrote one ).

As well as really well balanced game play it has a great electronic soundtrack and some nifty features like the ability to move things with force waves. If you like bat and ball games you really have to play it.

It really does validate my requirement that I try to make something with a twist for my Android project as you really can't compete with big studios if you are making a straight retro remake.

Android Project - LibGDX

2011-02-15T23:55:00.001Z

After a bit of research on Android frameworks I've decided to go with LibGDX. It looks like an excellent framework and has the advantage that Android is just one back end to the framework. It can also build for JOGL to produce a desktop app. As well as the obvious advantage of having two platforms for the price of one it also means you can play with the desktop version while you are tweaking gameplay without having to continually go through the rigmarole of building for the emulator.

LibGDX is an OpenGL library and unlike some of the more beginner focussed libraries it doesn't sugar coat anything, it expects you to deal with it's eccentricities.

I noticed that many of the other Android libraries seem to be using the libraries from LibGDX so I thought I might as well go straight to the source.

For those who are not au fait with such things OpenGL is a library that provides a standard way to talk to graphics accelerators. Before it existed people writing PC games had to write their own drivers for every single graphics card they wanted to support. OpenGL compliant hardware supports a standard set of features if you write code using an OpenGL library it will work any compliant hardware.

You might wonder why graphics hardware is important if you have a device with a speedy processor. CPUs are what's called a Turing machine which means they can do pretty much anything you can dream of while graphics accelerators can only perform a very limited set of instructions tuned for moving shapes around, but because they are so specialised and perform actions in parallel they can increase graphics performance, by a factor of tens or hundreds.

Previous Java games I have written have used the Java2D library which allows you to draw graphical primitives on a canvas without graphics acceleration and while this might be fine for a simple game running on a desktop PC if I have any aspiration for writing more advanced game on heavily resource constrained devices I'm going to need to learn how to use hardware accelerated graphics (That said I developed my desktop game on an 800MHz PIII and will be developing my mobile game on a 1GHz Galaxy S)

I'm definitely going to use the Box2D library in the future, but I think in order to get on with writing a game without having to spend to much time learning stuff I'll make OpenGL the new thing for my first project and introduce Box2D on the follow up.

I've been toying with the idea of updating Brick of Destiny to use OpenGL, but having reviewed the source I used the collision detection from Java2D quite extensively and the game also has a fixed frame rate which would mean tinkering with the rendering and simulation quite a bit so much so that it wouldn't speed things up that much. Last but not least I made a few school boy errors in the code as a gaming noob and so I would either have to waste time fixing them, be forever annoyed by bad decisions.

Next time hopefully I'll write up some concrete game design for my project.

SQL Hell

2011-02-15T13:06:00.001Z

Today I needed to install MS SQL Server on a PC.
My usual experience with installing a database engine is MySQL on Ubuntu where you open a terminal and type:

"sudo apt-get install mysql-server"

That's it job done. 10 minutes later and you have a working DB on your server. If there are dependencies or things it needs to change it works it out for you and sorts it.

Here is the process for MS SQL Server 2008 on my XP PC

9:20AM Decide to install MS SQL Server
Search google, go to the SQL Express 2008 site
Run somekind of Java downloader which crashes firefox
Installer application reuiqres a hot fix and will not run
Manually download and run hotfix
Reboots computer without asking work lost
Run graphical installer agree to EULA
Will not install because power shell is not installed (No information provided as to what this is or how to get it)
Back to google
Can't install powershell because it can't validate Windows is genuine
Download validator tool
Run tool manually copy validation code into website
Download and install powershell agree to EULA
Installer won't run because the machine has Visual studio 2008 but this is not patched to SP1
Visual studio will not update because I am not using Internet explorer
Back to google
Download visual studio 2008 SP1
Run graphical installer
Agree to licence terms
Visual studio 2008 Installer takes half an hour to run
Go through pages of incomprehensible set up dialogues
SQL Server 2008 installer takes half an hour to run
12:07 Installer completed

And people say administering Linux is hard......

Nokia and I (A cautionary tale)

2011-02-12T01:48:00.001Z

So today the long heralded rumour was confirmed and Nokia announced that over the next year or so it would be euthanising its ailing Symbian mobile platform.

I've been following the ongoing saga of Nokia's slow fall from grace for some time, partially because I work for a company that develops mobile phone software (amongst other things) and partially because of my own experiences with Nokia over the years.

When I think back it seems like an impossibly long time ago that people marvelled at Nokia as kings of the user interface. I realised that looking through the history of my experiences with Nokia shows problems that started before the iPhone hit the market and are rooted in taking your consumers for granted.

Love At First Ring

My first Nokia was also my first ever mobile phone. I had just arrived at university and the phones in the halls of residence were painfully expensive as was the norm in the pre-ubiquitous mobile ownership days of the late 90's.

I could barely afford the contract as it was, but when I saw the sleek and sexy lines of the 3210 I knew I had to have it. It stood out like a beacon amongst the lumpy grey boxes with external aerials that filled the shop. I never regretted the extra I had to pay for it. It served me for years running through several batteries and cases. The user interface was perfect; snappy and everything where you expected it to be.

When it finally died I replaced it with a 3310 which was the same only better. I kept it until it died shunning such decadence as colour screens and polyphonic ringtones as the frivolous distractions they so clearly were.

The Finnish Rebellion

Some years down the line the company I worked for were bought by German engineering behemoth Siemens. As a result everyone had to hand in their corporate issue Nokia mobile phones and get a shiny new Siemens mobile phone. The backlash was huge. People flat out refused to to return their Nokias others went out and bought replacement Nokias with their own money. The clunky Teutonic user interface of the Siemens phones seemed stone age by comparison and besides every desk in the building featured the ubiquitous Nokia charger.

Smartphone Hell

Tempted by the prospect of a 2 (count 'em) megapixel camera I defected to a Sony Ericsson K750i for my personal phone. It had plenty of snazzy features, and it was a good phone, but it didn't have the battery life and snappy streamlined interface of my old 3310, or my corporate low end Nok.

When I went with the good lady wife two replace her ailing phone I happened upon such a thing as a Nokia N73. This the man in the shop explained was a "smartphone". It could play video, retrieve my e-mails and even browse the internet and more than that it was made by Nokia the Finnish masters of user experience. I bought the phone and upgraded my subscription to take into account all the data I would soon be using.

The first thing I did when I got it home was try to listen to an MP3 except it didn't have a headphone jack. I had to buy an adapter which I promptly lost then gave up. The e-mail client flat out refused to pick up my GMail, It was too much bother to get video into a format it would play and the browser was a bad joke that I never managed to do anything useful with (I remind you I'm an engineer not an average punter).

As a professional geek I decided I would write some apps for it, but a quick look at the development environment told me it would be a nightmare.

To cap it all the phone would randomly crash, or switch its self off. I couldn't believe how one of my favourite tech companies Nokia could produce something so defective.

To give you an impression of how much I hated this phone, my wife banned the subject in our house so frequent were my tirades on its deficiencies.

Maybe it was just a duff model. I asked around. A friend who shelled out for the even more expensive flagship N95 told me that when his contract expired he was planning to hit it with a hammer and then burn it in the garden.

Running to Standstill

When the iPhone was released in 2007 the world changed. I was surprised to discover that the iPhone 2G specs weren't a patch on my year old N73 (no 3G, worse camera, no flash, no SD card, no front facing camera), but the difference was that suddenly everything worked, e-mail and web browsing were a pleasure.

A year down the line in 2008 and the press were full of tales of the forthcoming Nokia 5800 the new touchscreen device that would level the playing field.

A perk of my current job is that I generally get to play with every high end phone on the market. When the 5800 arrived I decided to use it as my work phone. I lasted half an hour. The clunky resistive touch screen interface was so broken that I couldn't even make phone calls or write text messages effectively.

Though each successive generation was heralded as the iPhone killer, four years after the release of the iPhone the current £430 N8 flagship is still years behind even the first gen Apple product in the UI stakes.

How were these things even selling? I asked myself.

Backlash Begins

I started to understand what the answer might be when I went into town to look at the brand new Android phone the G1. I asked if I could try it and the guy in the shop said no. I asked how he expected to sell any. He said "Most people either know what they want from TV advertising, or else they buy what the sales assistant tells them to buy". When you couple this with the fact that most newspaper phone reviewers don't bother to test phones (they essentially republish bits of the press release and rate it according to the specs) and you can see how these pieces of junk get into the hands of a lot of people.

The thing that seems to have passed Nokia by is that these phones are being sold to people not statistics. A two year contract is a very long time to be stuck with a device that you hate and by the end of that period you are going to be pretty pissed. When I traded my n73 for an Android phone I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't buy another Nokia mobile phone without very good reason and I don't doubt that there are millions of people who feel the same way. Perhaps this is what Strephen Elop means when he talks about Nokia loosing mindshare in the mobile market.

When I have some time I'll give my thoughts on the Nokia / MS tie up, but now I need to go to bed.

Android Project - Game Engines

2011-02-10T22:27:00.001Z

In the comments to my previous post iPhone developer extraordinaire Chris suggested using a third party physics engine for my game. I don't know why I hadn't thought of this in the first place. For web development I wouldn't dream of starting a project without using a framework. After all the longer you spend writing loads of boilerplate code the less time you have to spend on the good stuff.

Chris suggested using the Box2D library which looks very good. As Android is a Java platform a Java library would be ideal and luckily some helpful chaps have ported the library and called it JBox2D. There are some very nice looking demos on the website and a helpful tutorial about getting it up and running on Android. I was slightly concerted when playing with the applets that there were a few freezes and stutters (My laptop is only a year old) and a quick search on the internets revealed that most people were having problems with the Java garbage collector causing problems.

Luckily all is not lost. Android is not a Java only environment thanks to something called the NDK (Which as far as I can gather is just Android's version of JNI) which allows you do drop meaty chunks of speedy C++ into your Java stew. This requires you to do a bit of work to wrap any C++ classes you want to use with a bit of Java.

Luckily a bit more Googling revealed the AndEngine and libgdx a pair of free Android game frameworks. Both use OpenGL for graphics and rather conveniently integrate the Box2D library saving me the job of getting my hands dirty with NDK. Opinion seems to be that libgdx is faster and better documented while AndEngine is higher level and easier to get to grips with. I quite like the fact that libgdx offers the ability to compile into JOGL for desktop apps rather than having to continually build apks and test on the emulator.

I'm still undecided between the number puzzle and the jumping frog game but either way I'm going to give a framework a go and see what it offers.

Planning an Android Game Project

2011-02-09T00:06:00.001Z

Back in 2008 when I wasn't feeling particularly engaged with my day job I wrote a Java game called Brick of Destiny. It was one of the most rewarding projects I've worked on and it inspired me to get a job where I could spend more time coding. Two and a bit years down the line and it occurred to me that since I've been a software developer for a living I haven't really done much in the way of coding outside of work, something which I intend to remedy by writing a game.

I have a few objectives for the project:

Simple and self contained as I have a short attention span
This isn't an intellectual exercise I wan't to write something people will play
I don't want to write something there are a thousand versions of as someone with greater resources will probably have done it better so Pac Man or Space Invaders is out of the question unless I can give it a twist
I'm going to document the development process on my blog

I have an Android phone and my Java is getting a little rusty so I'm going to write the game for Android as it's interesting to work within the constraints of a limited device. The Android Market also gives me the opportunity to get the game out to lots of people rather than the handful who played my last game.

I have the platform and the language so now all I need is an idea. I think a simple puzzle type game would be the easiest thing to implement as it can take place within a single screen and shouldn't require too much effort.

I've tried to think back to games I enjoyed from the 8 bit and 16 bit eras for inspiration and so far I've had a few Ideas, but I don't have my heart set on any one thing yet.

So far my ideas include:

Stress

An implementation of the card game Stress. It's an interesting card game because it's real time so you don't play in turns which makes it more of an action title compared to your average card game. I was all set to get started with this until I realised that there is already a version of it on the Android market (This surprised me because it's an obscure enough game that Wikipedia doesn't know about it ). Having installed the existing game on my phone it's not the most impressive implementation so I'm pretty sure I could create something better.

Jumping Based Platform Puzzle

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 which came with a game called Roland In The Caves.

It was a really original if somewhat frustrating game in which you played as a flea trying to escape from a cave with the twist being that you could only move by jumping. I love physics based games and I think there is something very satisfying about games that involve objects moving with parabolic motion (For example Worms)

The game I have in mind would be a series of puzzle rooms filled with obstacles that can only be overcome with precision jumping. I would also probably include some elements from Bill's Tomato Game which was an Amiga game I really enjoyed in which you had to place objects (springs, fans, etc) to ensure the safe passage of a particularly squashy tomato through a level filled with hazards.

I am quite taken with this idea, but it is definitely the most challenging game idea I have thought of and the Android Market is awash with high quality physics based puzzle games.

Number Game

Number based puzzles are always popular and it should be fairly easy to implement a single screen game.

So far the best idea I have had is for a bejewelled style clear the balls from a grid type game using numbers rather than colours.

The objective would be to find lines of numbers within the grid which fulfilled certain criterion for example where the first two add up to the third, or where they are in ascending order. When these were found the numbers would explode and more numbers would fall into the grid.

This is the front runner so far, but I need to think about the game mechanics a little more to make sure that it won't be trivial or impossible to play!

If anyone out there has a genius idea for a game but lacks the coding skills to bring it to life give me a shout also anyone who fancies doing some graphics for a game get in touch if you want to collaborate.

Hopefully I will have chosen an idea for my next post so there should be some more detailed design for the selected idea.

The (not particularly) dark secret of phone hacking

2011-01-28T22:59:00.001Z

Between the News of the World's rather shady dealings with voice mail hacking and the amorphous web vigilante Anonymous leaping to the defence of Wikileaks there has been an enormous amount of talk of hacking in the press. From the tone of the press you would imagine these acts are being performed by a cabal of amoral genius hackers (If you were feeling saucy you might imagine them as Lisbeth Salander, but I've chosen the rather more wholesome Matthew Broderick) . After all much of the case has centred around Glenn Mulcaire a private detective hired for the task surely he must be some kind of master of these dark arts.

Unfortunately the truth of the matter is really quite mundane. Most mobile networks allow you to access your voicemails from numbers other than your own phone provided you have a PIN. The mobile phone networks in their wisdom enable this feature automatically even though most people don't use it, or even know it exists. Not only that, but unless you have explicitly changed it to something more secure it will be set to a default. (If you are on Orange it's 1111, for O2 it's 8705, etc). If this has come as news to you then it's highly likely that anyone who knows your mobile phone number and can be bothered to Google the default PIN for your network could listen to your messages right now.

It's so laughably simple to do that it astounds me that Clive Goodman needed to employ a PI to do it for him creating a paper trail that put him in jail. The real scandal is that no one in the media seems to be criticising the phone networks for giving everyone the same default password, or the government for failing to advise MPs on basic telephone security.

So we've established that cell phone hacking is pretty simple, but bringing down Pay Pal that must take some kind of \Matrix style genius right?

Not so much. The attacks on companies refusing to deal with Wikileaks was a type of attack known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS for short. The name sounds awfully complicated, but it's actually a basic as you can get and isn't really hacking at all.

You might remember a little while back some hippy types got rather annoyed with Top Shop engaging in alleged tax avoidance and so decided to go and stand outside and cause a nuisance.

A DDoS attack is simply the electronic equivalent.

Lots of angry people connect to the Paypal site at the same moment until the servers that power the site are overwhelmed and can no longer do their job. Nothing is hacked and nothing is broken, but rather like Top Shop during the protest so many grumpy people are standing in the way that regular punters get turned away. You may have heard talk of sophisticated software called things like "Ion Cannon", but in reality a drinking bird pressing the refresh button on your web browser would have the same effect. It's no different to when you hear that a ticket website has crashed as a result of demand for the new Take That tour.

DDoS attacks are sometime carried out using hacked PCs by organised crime to do nefarious things like blackmail online casinos, but in this case it was simply a group of like minded individuals expressing their frustration with the online equivalent of a peaceful protest.

The fear of the new means the Top Shop story gets reported as people expressing their democratic right to protest while the tone of the Wikileaks story ends up as evil hackers trying to bring about the end of society.

Kindle - First Impressions

2011-01-04T20:25:00.001Z

You may have seen my previous post on my compulsion to buy a Kindle. Well quelle surprise I caved after getting to have a play with a family members Kindle over the holidays.

It arrived today and so I thought I would quickly post some first impressions before writing a full review when I've spent more time with it

Q: Are you ready for some unboxing porn?

A: Of course you are!

Apologies for the rubbish picture quality, but unfortunately though the Galaxy S is a great phone it has a rubbish camera (more of that in another post)

It's brilliant that companies are focussing on creating a positive experience when you first come in to contact with a new shiny thing and I was really impressed with the excellent packaging. Minimal and understated, but really classy and well made at the same time.

I was also impressed that the charger is a really nice looking unit and that power and data is supplied by a single Micro USB (Devices without standard connectors are my biggest gadget pet hate)

I can see why people have tried to rip the screen off believing it to be a dust cover because it looks so much like matt plastic. It took me a moment to realise that it was displaying a welcome message.

The Kindle feels light and easy to manage. I can imagine happily reading with it for hours (And after writing this I intend to). The screen is fantastic I haven't stopped being impressed with the magic effect of seemingly printed words changing before my eyes. It definitely fulfils Arthur C Clarke's third rule: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The fact that when you buy a Kindle it comes pre-linked to your Amazon account is also brilliant because it allows you to dive straight in with nothing to get in your way.

The overriding impression that you get when holding the Kindle is that it feels special in the way that Apple has been able to nail with it's recent products and the Galaxy Tab I was playing with earlier today really didn't.

My Kindle's first big outing is going to be on my four day business trip to Milan next week so I'll write up my experiences when I get back.

Ciao for now.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

BBC Sound of 2011 Long List

2010-12-30T12:17:00.001Z

The BBC have just published their sound of 2011 long list some thoughts as I listen.

I'm impressed by Esben and the Witch as their name implies they sound like a dark fairytale. If their album keeps up this level of quality I can see it being on heavy rotation.

I'm a sucker for anything with a Dub Step flavour so I enjoyed Jamie Woon though his voice is a little commercial for my tastes, in the D&B/Dubstep category Nero excites me the most. It would be great to see an artist other than Pendulum getting some viscous breaks in the charts.

Daley is clearly a big talent, not the kind of thing I spend a lot of time listening to, but the world needs an alternative to Jamie T who can sing in tune.

The Naked and Famous are perhaps a little too indebted to MGMT on the evidence of what I've heard, but there's always a place in my heart for sunny pop music.

No clips on the BBC site but The Vaccines sound like a strange hybrid of Mumford and Sons and Interpol topped off with the fantastic baritone of Justin Young. I found a clip of them playing on Jools Holland you can check out. I'll eat my hat if these guys don't make it (Which naturally means they are doomed)

Warpaint are capable of dreamy loveliness, but Undertow sounds a little too much like a rewrite of Polly by Nirvana to my ears.

While Clare Maguire and Jessie J may well end up being huge they do nothing for me.

I think Anna Calvi has the potential to produce a world class album. Jezebel is a curiosity, but Moulinette is a wonderful track.

I'm not going to make any predictions of who will be the true breakthrough, but even the beeb picked Little Boots over Lady Gaga.

Humble Bundle 2 Reviews - Machinarium

2010-12-22T22:50:00.001Z

The Humble Bundle 2 is available for another couple of days (Total at time of writing over $1.5!) They have recently added Steam access to the games and thrown in the games from the original bundle free of charge so there is even more reason to grab a copy if you haven't already.

The second review in the series is Machinarium which is an old skool point and click adventure in the style of Monkey Island and the like.

The game tells the tale of a little robot called Josef who has been dumped in the wilderness by gangsters who have kidnapped his girlfriend. You have to traverse across several screens full of puzzles and quests to get her back and thwart the evil robots.

Like Braid what sets this apart from the crowd is the spectacular artistic direction and story telling. Everything from the little touches in the animation (Like the way Josef slides down banisters, or dreams about his girlfriend when you leave him to his own devices ) to the wonderful scribbley line drawings that take the place of dialogue screams attention to detail.

The puzzles are tricky, but satisfying when you complete them and in a genius move a full guide is always available but each page can only be accessed by playing a time consuming mini game meaning you only ever look when you really need to,

I straight up loved this game. It's fairly short (I finished it in a couple of evenings of casual play) and has zero replay value, but both as a narrative and as a lateral thinking puzzle it has been one of my favourite games of the year.

Humble Bundle 2 Reviews - Braid

2010-12-16T16:41:00.001Z

For those of you who aren't familiar The Humble Bundle is a collection of games by top indie devs which are collected together and sold for a limited time as a pay what you like bundle with a proportion of the money going to charity. I bought the first bundle and was really pleased with it. All of the games were released for Mac. Windows and Linux, were totally DRM free and could be downloaded as many times as you like. After release several of the games were made open source and also made available to download via Steam.

The Humble Bundle 2 has just been released (http://www.humblebundle.com/) and I excitedly bought it on the first day (At time of writing it is available for another 5 days) .

I thought I would give a few thoughts on each game as I played it and the first up is Braid.

Braid is probably the most famous game in the bundle as it has already been a critically acclaimed hit on the Xbox arcade and PS3 where it has a 93% Metacritic score so you know you are in for something pretty special. The game is a simple platformer in the style of Mario, but what make it stand out are the fantastic graphics which look like a water colour painting and a superb orchestral soundtrack.

The core mechanic of the game is based around the protagonist Tim's ability to rewind time. This is used to great effect as there is no need to have any kind of menu or HUD. All bad things (monsters, spikes, fire) are instant kills and you simply rewind time and try again if you fail so the screen is kept completely free of score, lives, etc. The time rewinding mechanic is used for some mind bending puzzles and is tightly tied into the plot which explores the idea that someone with power over time could erase all their mistakes and annoyances and if you could would be the right thing to do.

Braid is an excellent game and at £7.99 on PSN you could easily purchase the bundle for that price and enjoy the rest of the games as a bonus.

Daft Punk's Tron Legacy Soundtrack is Awesome

2010-12-11T11:36:00.001Z

Spotify have had a preview sampler of the Daft Punk soundtrack for the Tron Legacy movie for the last couple of weeks and since the full version has come out I have listened to very little else. It is a glorious, electro orchestral tour de force. I can't think of many more perfect pairings for a film soundtrack and I'm impressed that Disney have had the stones and the vision to hand a triple A blockbuster to a couple of French guys who think they are robots. It bodes very well for the movie which I still fully expect to be impressive nonsense, but at least now it might be stylish impressive nonsense.

Check out this trailer featuring stand out track Derezzed

Or listen to it on Spotify

Rotoscoped Insanity

I'm a huge fan of the Rotoscoped insanity that is the origional Tron. It's a little bit all over the place, but I think alongside War Games it really stands up as one of the greatest geek films of all time. I can watch the primitive CGI scenes over and over again, but I love the neon glow most of all (which few people even to this day realise was painstakingly rotoscoped by hand).

A weak point of the film was probably the Wendy Carlos soundtrack. It was quite reasonable to assume that the menacing synth work of Clockwork Orange might be carried across, but to me the soundtrack sits awkwardly and is quite conventional and in places cheesy.

Even if Tron Legacy is a stinker the soundtrack will still take it's rightful place in my heart alongside the greatest sci-fi sound track of all time the Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner.

By most measures The Saboteur is a terrible game - So why did I play it to the end?

2010-12-10T23:19:00.001Z

I'm not too picky with games. I have a Lovefilm subscription and due to the four point scale it's pretty much impossible to trust game reviews (with the possible exception of Ars and Edge) so I just tend to rent anything that looks interesting and send it back when I get bored. Sometimes I can't stand a game that everyone raves about (Modern Warfare 2) and occasionally I rather enjoy something that's generally considered to be junk (Excite Truck).

Space Invaders with Swastikas

Despite having read dozens of books on WWII there have been no games on the subject that I have enjoyed as they all seem to side step the reality of war and degenerate into Space Invaders with swastikas.

The last game I rented was The Saboteur; Pandemic's swan song before going belly up. It's a fantastic concept for a game. Set in occupied Paris during WWII and loosely based on the real life story of William Grover-Williams winner of the first Monaco Grand Prix turned French resistance war hero. Perhaps this would be the first true war game. Unfortunately the game is so spectacularly mishandled it's reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer rewrites Mr Smith Goes to Washington as a bloodbath shootout.

For no apparent reason the protagonist has been changed into a horrific Irish stereotype (genuine sample dialogue: "OIM BLOODY OIRISH!) who's only interests are drinking, smoking and shagging. Worst of all he openly doesn't give a toss about the plight of the French under the Nazis and is only fighting to get revenge on a German solider who killed his friend after they tried to steal his car in a tit for for tat dispute over a fixed race (I'm not kidding).

Not only is the main character a misogynistic. homophobic moral vacuum who lives in a brothel (complete with premium DLC to add computer boobies) the voice acting, plot and script are risible with accents that would make the cast of Allo Allo blush. The plot is so muddled that in 1940 the war doesn't seem to have started but three months later, the Nazis seem to have invented Nuclear Weapons, have highly advanced radar systems, conquered France (and rebuilt half of it) and the French resistance is in full swing.

All this and more is summed up nicely in Keza MacDonald's opinion piece for Eurogamer "Why I Hate... The Saboteur" (so I'm not going to talk any more about how offensive the plot is) which really got me thinking if it's so bloody terrible, why was I half way through it and why did I complete it last night?

Game Mechanic Bingo

It certainly isn't because of the focussed game play. At various points The Saboteur continually switches between third person shooter, stealth, racing game, parkour platformer, demolition sim and Nazi themed GTA. You can imagine someone at Insomniac pitching it as Metal Gear Solid meets Gran Turismo, meets Assassins Creed, meets Gears of War, meets Red Faction.

This unfortunately results in nothing being done very well. Despite playing a racing driver you only get to take part in five races in the whole game which aren't all that much fun (Imagine a racing game based on the GTA engine). Worse still stealth games rely on the guards being much stronger than you, but the shooter parts result in our hero having huge amounts of regenerating health and vast amounts of fire power so upon discovery you can often just run down the machine gun fire for a one hit neck break for a free Gestapo uniform shaped ticket back to stealth mode.

The stealth model its self is somewhat broken relying on what is called a zone of suspicion which shows up on your map around Nazi property and locations of explosions or gunfire. This means the following are all possible: Driving a car down a busy road into a fuel dump but jumping out before the zone of suspicion will not register as a suspicious event, when walking up to a guard tower the lookout will loose interest when you are underneath because he can't see you meaning you can always blow them up in complete safety, and after driving a tank into a base and blowing most of it sky high you can jump out and switch off the alarm and everyone will assume it was a false alarm and go about their business despite half of the base being on fire.

The map is so vast and so filled with German hardware and troops it seems like an impossible task to defeat them, but as on death anything you destroy stays that way and you always start at the nearest gun shop you quickly realise the war of attrition is in the other direction. A fool proof technique is to stock up on rockets, drive a car straight through the front gates of fortress blow up everything in sight, die wake up at the gun shop rinse and repeat.

There are almost too many silly things list like the fact that there are no consequences of driving a car into civilians, or a wall at 100mph, or that in Germany everyone is still French and on your side, or the controls which share the same button for detonate and shoot making it easy to execute the perfect stealth sabotage then randomly fire into the air in a room full of Nazis if you hold the button a microsecond too long, and worst crime of all the grenade button mapped to the (hair) trigger meaning you blow yourself up if you ever put the controller down without pausing.

So what's good about it?

The Joy Of Blowing Things Up

The first and most obvious thing is that blowing stuff up is fun. Covertly planting dynamite on tanks and anti-aircraft guns then watching your handy work as bits of burning metal ascend into the sky never really gets old and there's an awful lot of stuff to blow up. Gunplay is also solid and enjoyable with a good range of weapons on hand.

Paris J'Taime

The real star of the show in this game is Paris. The city and surrounding countryside are lovingly rendered and you are often met by breathtaking cityscapes complete with iconic Parisian landmarks (Although it does have the amusing Team America tendency to put the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triumph right next to each other). Much has been made of the novel mechanic where the sense of hope in the populace is reflected with colour. Areas under German control are rendered in black and white with the only splashes of colour the red of blood, fire and Nazi symbols while areas in which the resistance have a foothold are in vivid colour. The game engine is solid and has some clever anti-aliasing on the PS3 which keep everything looking smooth not to mention it is one of the only action games I've played recently that hasn't crashed at the drop of a hat.

The sound track is also inspired with some excellent jazz tracks including Caravan and Feeling Good featuring extensively.

I can't help imagining the turtle neck wearing art department despairing as the high fiving frat boys in the gameplay department filled their loving crafted city with strippers, cartoon Nazis. "Sweet Jumps" and a main character who will commit murder for a case of booze (I'm not kidding)

So Close and yet So Crass

All in all this game feels like a wasted opportunity. If the management at Pandemic had picked one or two gameplay mechanics and stuck to them the action could be much tighter and more fun.

The second and more significant improvement would have been to send the entire script and voice teams on a day out and then move offices while they were away. It's a rare example of a game that could be remade without changing the engine, or graphics and easily be double the game with with the kind of charm and charisma displayed by the story teams at studios like Naughty Dog or Rockstar.

As it stands the best way to enjoy this game is to rent it and skip the cut scenes.