Brady Kelly, a SA Developer .NET moderator, will be replacing this month’s TechReel session with a talk on using Windows Powershell; Simon Stewart and Tristan Bergh will be introducing db4o, a database engine for mobile and real-time control systems and lastly Angus Logan, Senior Product Manager for Windows Live, will be given us the inside track on what his team is doing.

Then we have 2 dinners organized. One with Angela Gerber from the Western Cape chapter and the other with Willie Roberts from KwaZulu-Natal. Unfortunately their schedules don’t match so we can’t have one big party with the both of them, but this is an opportunity to find out what other people are doing in development circles across the country.

Overall a packed month, not forgetting there’s TechEd 2007 as well. All the times and directions are in this month’s newsletter as well as the Events forum on the SA Developer .NET website.

Hope to see you there!

A quick search of The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) reveals a press release, dated 6 August 2007, with a contact number for more information.

Courtesy of The South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) “Yes, we know you’re limited”

If it’s not to late to change your weekend plans, how about joining me at a Guitar Hero 2 competition in Boksburg, Gauteng?

I’m organising a friendly competition of Guitar Hero 2 on the Xbox 360 at this month’s Mayhem Open LAN on the 15th September 2007 at the Casa Dos Poveros Hall in Boksburg.  This friendly competition will, hopefully, be the start of something more regular and is a bit of a build up to the Guitar Hero 2 Encore competition at rAge 2007.  Unfortunately there are no prizes this time around but come and check out the competition and find out if you’ve got what it takes to rock air guitar.

When: 15th September 2007 10:00 – 15:00
Where: Casa Dos Poveros Hall, Dayan Street, Dayan Glen, Boksburg (directions)
Cost: R50 entrance to the Mayhem Open LAN
Bring: Blonde wig, leather or latex stage costume, face paint & groupies
Really Bring: Money for refreshments
RSVP: On The Xbox Lounge website (http://www.thexboxlounge.co.za/Site/Lans/ViewLan.aspx?tid=176) or on the day

I’ve setup the stand so that the players will be facing the audience (i.e. adoring fans and other players) and both will have a TV to watch the action.  The finalists will also be judged on their stage presence as well as their score so it should make for an entertaining event.  Of course there’ll be loads of pictures taken and I’m sure Craig will record the proceedings and put it on Zoopy or similar.
See you there.  Rock on!

The next issue of the local, online game development magazine is available for download from the Dev.Mag website.

Issue 16 really highlights the continuing effort that the contributors are putting into this community project. In particular there’s: Part 2 & 3 of A Beginner’s Guide; Part 3 of Game Coding with Trigonometry; Part 7 of the Roach Toaster 2 post mortem and Part 6 of The History of I-Imagine. There’s also the continuing Blender tutorials, opinion columns and local and international news.

So grab yourself a copy and enjoy!

Over this past week I’ve been working on Adventure Quest 2 (direct download) and I’ve ripped out all the monsters, items and animations and implemented a random dungeon generator.  This generator creates a 10×10 tilearea of passages and rooms based on 32 predefined tiles which you can check by pressing the “m” key while in the game.  You can also press the “z” key to zoom out and see the whole level that was generated.

The problem I’m sitting with now is that when the game starts I create nearly 6000 object instances which slows the game down even on fast machines.  I’m hoping to solve this by only creating the objects in the players view but I have to think of a clever way to manage this.

I’m also working on the network-ability for the game before I re-add the monsters and animations.  The hardest part in networking is not the implementation but the timing so the same event happens on all the machines simultaneously so I want to make sure the networking messages are solid before processing with the action part of the game.  I will however add some items for players to collect while I’m working on the combat to give an incentive to explore the dungeon and test the system.

If you’re interested in more detailed progress on Adventure Quest 2, I’ve started a thread on the Game.Dev forum which you can participate in.

Warning: Some of the games are at various stages of polish, and while most of the developers are continuing to work on and improve their games these competition entries might have some bugs in them. 

First Place (winning R5,000) Cartesian Chaos by Evil_Toaster

“Evil_Toaster kept lobbing ideas at his friends until he hit upon the core idea behind Cartesian Chaos (originally named Monster Maths, but given a much cooler moniker by the forums) – that’s what producers call focus testing. ET’s long term goal is to make a living off his games and that shows in his attention to detail and his dedication to making everything he produces as polished as possible… On top of all that, Cartesian Chaos is an educational dream: It’s fun, it’s about a decidedly useful concept and it’s got a learning curve that pulls players from “Uh – there, I think – *click*” to “Hah, I’m doing linear substitution in my head 5 times a second!” “

“Slick. Polished. Great learning material. Fun game… Those are just some of the phrases that describe Cartesian Chaos. ET really has worked hard on the game and it shows. He deservedly takes first place with a game that hopefully will soon make many people’s mathematical understanding slightly better!”

Second Place (R2,500) Rockets! by Gazza_N

“Build rockets. Fire them into the sky. Learn physics! Literally, that’s exactly what Rockets! is about. The learning aspects aren’t in your face, they’re simply integrated completely into the gameplay: If you want to see how well your rocket is going to do at a glance, you’ll quickly grasp the interplay of forces in a vector diagram. The design values are also very well thought out, with a tutorial level that has you almost-but-not-quite reaching your goal several times until you get the gist of the game. Smart. This is another game that Mindset was very keen on expanding, adding more information about how rockets (and the propulsion systems in the game) work and cleaning up the interface a little… Small touches like placing a schematic of your current rocket configuration in the top right of the screen, etc.”

“Again, with guerrilla learning being the prime judging criteria, Rockets! quickly established exactly what it was there to do: Make things make sense. No complexities, no frills and no seperation between gameplay, fun and understanding. Exactly what the competition was set up to create.”

Third Place (R1,500) Math Attack by Squid

“What happens when you take a solid puzzle mechanic, add in a little maths and rapidly prototype the idea? If you go by Squid’s resultant Math Attack, the answer is 100% pure potential. From a learning angle, splitting maths into single digit operations – while maintaining the importance of positioning in a larger number – is apparently a truly momentous feat. To hear Mindset’s resident maths curriculum person, teachers routinely try and fail to achieve this conceptual understanding in their students. Who would have thought that it would be so easily achieved in a game? There was a lot of interest in helping Squid turn this into a cellphone game ”

“For a prototype to so elegantly capture a game idea isn’t rare. But for a prototype to wow as many people as Math Attack did, that’s special. In terms of potential I’m sure Squid will be able to create new puzzle mechanics to flesh out a fuller version of the game – And Mindset is keen to see that happen.”

Best New Entrant (R1,000) Typing Tower by ShadowMaster

“The second of our two typing games, Typing Tower adds a sense of urgency and motivation to the standard typing mix by asking you to avoid inexorably rising water: Jumping from platform to platform by typing the word on each platform. Typing Tower received a lot of forum ideas and polish suggestions, but we can only wish that Mindset’s suggestions had been around from the beginning: Take the gameplay and instead of focusing on typing, reproduce english “drill and practice” exercises that are typically boring or uninspiring for learners. Or even make the game about spelling and reward players for correcting spelling mistakes on the platforms with even bigger jumps (higher platforms have more errors in the words, which get reduced as they come closer to the player).”

“With a slightly changed focus, Typing Tower could have claimed a podium spot. As it stands it’s not hard to award it the best new entrant award for focusing its gameplay so tightly around the core objective of the game. All the other work that went into it: menus, sounds and the like did not go unnoticed and bode well for ShadowMaster’s future games.”

Other Entries (to view the comments on these games check out Danny’s post on the community forum):

Angle Racer by edg3

Cloudy Day by UpsiDownQuestionMark

CyberJam by Tr00jg

Elkwood High by CiNiMoD & Darth_Penguin

Extreme Elements by UntouchableOne

Epidemic by herman.tulleken and Chris

K.I.S.S. by Kimau

PartyType by cairnswm

Projectile 169 by Aikur

The Journey by Thaumaturge

Treasure Hunter by Emerican

Free DVDs with game development content and resources will be handed out for those of you who are interested in trying your hand at making games at home and I think it’s particularly noteworthy that there are going to be a couple of talks on developing games using the XNA Framework and for the Xbox 360.

There will also be the prize-giving of Game.Dev Competition 15 (which ran from the beginning of June to the end of July) sponsored by Mindset Learn and valued at R10,000.

For this year’s event I’ll be dedicated to helping the Game.Dev community run the stand and giving demos on building games using GameMaker.  I’ll also be giving a talk on “Re-playability through meta-gaming and achievements”.

To keep up-to-date with what the community will be doing checkout their official website at http://www.gamedotdev.co.za and follow the discussion on their forums.  You can also check out the write-up and photos of what happened last year on their website.

To see what I mean we have to start looking beyond the simple, one dimensional arrays that most demos have dealt with and start assuming we want to see aggregated data from a collection of list.  For this example I have a list of Customers and a list of Orders joining on a CustomerID and for my resultset I want to see a list of the names of all the customers and the sum of the amounts of their orders.  If I were to write this as a SQL statement it would look something like:

SELECT Customers.Name, SUM(Orders.Amount)
FROM Customers
LEFT JOIN Orders ON Customers.CustomerID = Orders.CustomerID
GROUP BY Customers.Name

Thanks to some guidance from Anders Hejlsberg himself, we know:

“A grouping join produces a hierarchical result that pairs each element from the outer sequence with its corresponding sequence of elements from the inner sequence.”

Which means if we join a list we can get a reference to another list of the same type that will be filtered on the join.  The important trick is to put the results into a new variable.

var query = from c in customers
                join o in orders on c.CustomerID equals o.CustomerID into co
                select new { c.Name, Total = co.Sum(o => o.Amount) };

Using the code snippet above; if you hover over co in Visual Studio it will tell you that it is a “(range variable) IEnumerable<Order>” which we can now use in the select projection.  This is the piece I was missing when I first started playing with aggregation because the aggregation functions need to take in an array and c and o are single instances.

Now for the interesting part, the optimization.  When you iterate over the first instance in the outer sequence (customers) the application will iterate over each instance in the inner sequence (orders). After that it won’t iterate over inner sequence again while you iterate over the outer sequence except that because I have an aggregate function in my projection the application will have to iterate over each item in the hierarchical result (co) to get the values out.  Remember that the hierarchical result will be smaller for each instance in the outer sequence (and can be null) because of the join predicate.

In conclusion we’ve seen how LINQ can help us look at various disparate sets of data and dynamically build relationships between them; and while there might still be valid questions about the size and complexity of the data you can parse through LINQ, the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies to how much you get out of using this compared to writing your own queries.

Before I could raise any comment about possible corruption if I just handed money over, I was told to walk off to a nearby parked van where I’d receive a receipt and confirmation that I’ve paid the fines.  This was great as I have no problem complying with the law and paying my guilt so long as there’s proof of payment; and I was greeted by a friendly staff who quickly processed my fines so I could be on my way.

But standing at the back of the van with the photographs and fines in my hand imagine my surprise when I see a sign, stuck to the side of the vehicle, saying I could pay my fines online at Payfine.co.za!

And after enquiring, you can indeed pay your fines online for: Cape Town, Greater Johannesburg, Stellenbosch, Paarl, Swellendam and Mosselbay with more areas being added (although I couldn’t get a timeline as to when).  You can also access most of the photos associated with the fines (unfortunately they don’t have access to all. I’d blame the bureaucratic nature of the way the traffic departments are setup); and, unfortunately, they only accept credit cards. Another note is that it can take up to 24 hours to go from the website to the traffic department but thankfully the website allows you to print a receipt.

This is a step in the right direction for modernizing the bureaucracy in South Africa.  I’ve mentioned a couple of times that South Africans are becoming comfortable spending money online and I hope they provide more payment channels and get access to more areas soon.  This site needs marketing so that more people can benefit from its convenience.

On a final note, Payfine.co.za is being developed and maintained by Syntell who, according to their website, is quite involved in assisting local government revenue collection and providing complete camera-based traffic violation systems.