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So I just realized how long it has been since I have posted something here on the blog (a few days shy of 2 months!). The sad thing is I don’t really have a ton of new to write about. Life is pretty standard and nothing out of the ordinary. I guess thats not completely true, I took a new job – today marks the end of my first full work week for the company, and I have to say I forgot what it was like to work a full work week.

It’s going to be C# for the most part, but there is always some random things outside of your normal day to day work, this week it was configuring a ruby project on one of our hosting servers. It has only been a week but I have enjoyed it thus far.

The gamerdna crew are busier than ever rocking out new updates, features, bug fixes, and support of gamerdna and 360voice – this week was kind of a blur so I was a bit off the map but I am getting back into the swing of things this weekend.

As a present to myself for moving back into a full time position, as well as a “this laptop is 4 years old time to upgrade” issue, I picked up a new laptop. A Gateway FX gaming system – before looking at this laptop I didnt even know gateway still was around, but I have to say I am fairly pleased with it. The only fairly recent PC game I have is Demigod – and I have to say that it is down right amazing compared to my old setup. Probably going to pick up a few new PC titles now that I have a machine that can hold its own.

Well this was quite a brain dump of a post – but its been so long since I wrote something I figured I would get something together – going to have to try and get back into posting a bit more again, those of you that have followed me over the years are all ready probably fairly used to my random vanishing acts from time to time….

Looks like another month went by without any posts – shame on me. It seems that with the recent cut in hours at work I have less and less to blog about. I would say less gaming things to blog about because I haven’t been gaming as much, but even my little blog for the family stuff hasn’t been updated in quite a bit either.

Life is really business as usual still. My “real” job has become less of a real job and more like a low paying consulting contract, and I am filling the cracks with whatever work I can pick up here and there. Still cranking away at GamerDNA and 360voice, it is always interesting to take a step back and look at how much GamerDNA evolves week by week. That of course is not all my doing, but I at least play a small part in it.

Still haven’t put the time I should into Fallout 3, I blame the fact that I scatter my gaming over little spurts of times these days, and I really would like to immerse myself into the game for an extended period of time and really get some where. One of these nights I will get to it. I finally completed all the Comic missions in Marvel Ultimate Alliance with gold rewards – some of them are quite a challenge so quite an achievement in my book. I made a quick appearance in the Xbox Marathon to play with the GamerDNA crew, remotely unfortunately because from what I read they had snacks at the marathon location.

I am actually really started to look forward to Halo Wars, I have my fears that there won’t be many units and it will be of a repetitive game, but I am going to give it a fair chance. I always love a good RTS, even if I am not really very good at them, also still really wondering about the Dishwasher game – that’s the only Xbox Live Arcade game I am really anxious for at the moment. Speaking of upcoming games, if I do in fact slate of some dedicated time to playing games, I might start writing some reviews again – so send review copies on over if interested in having my opinion of them published for all to see.

Well its been ages since I have posted, I could list out the excuses but my gym teacher in high school used to always say “Excuses only satisfy those that make them”.  Perhaps a bit of a bitter view on life, but let’s be honest who really cares about the reasons?  Everyone has problems of their own in one way or another.

Lately I have been pounding pavement pretty hard on the job search front, so much so that I have even opened up my searching range to include relocation to a better part of the US.  Who knows where that will take me, or if I end up staying right where I am, perhaps I should visit a fortune teller and see.

In any event I am actually in the office today, for those of you that do not know we are working on a lowered hours schedule, which isn’t ideal – but there are a number of people in the company that are down to zero hours so it could be worse.  In any event I just had a WTF Moment, and had to post about it, so here goes.  This comes from an Access 97 – so quite a few years of band-aid fixes and development I am sure, but this one takes the cake

If DepartDate > #12/1/2008# Then
RunIndReport "HDetails", "Cancel", "HotelVoucher Report Batch"
RunIndReport "HDetails", "Cancel", "HotelVoucher Report Batch_SSS&GCT"
Else
RunIndReport "HDetails", "Cancel", "HotelVoucher Report Batchold"
RunIndReport "HDetails", "Cancel", "HotelVoucher Report Batch_SSS&GCT"
End If

so if Departure is after December 1st, do the exact same thing if its not….amazing!

So those of you that read along on my humble little blog know – I haved toyed around with XNA off and on for a bit now – and I actually finished a rough cut of a fully functional game.  Granted it wasn’t much to play with but truth be told my intent was to use it to learn, expand it from a single solitaire game to a group of solitaire games (like a selection fo 10 or so), with a ‘career stat’ type tracking for each of the game types.  So you would be able to look at things like your fastest completion time, your completion percentage, your wins versus losses, and who knows what else. Here and there over the past few weeks or so I did completely rework alot of the guts of the game to make it easier to add these to be built various solitaire game types, reviewed rules of a bunch of common solitaire game types,  and I completely reworked the user interface to allow mouse, or xbox controller to navigate the cards, but still had quite a bit to go.

So I was looking over my code for the game, deciding if I wanted to pick up some game coding tonight or if I wanted to actually play some games, and playing games won.  Since I haven’t really been on my xbox for long in the last few days I decided to browse the marketplace – the arcades and the community games….and what did I find?  Indirian Solitaire.  That’s right folks it just so happens the game I was planning to build and release was just put on the marketplace today.  Don’t get me wrong I am not saying they stole my code – or my idea, let’s be honest a solitaire game isn’t exactly ground breaking – but on the flip side, can I really continue to develop and release a game with pretty much the same features that this game provides?  The only thing that I was originally planning to include that they don’t have in their game was those career stats I mentioned.  It’s not the same as working on something like a RPG, or a platformer, which even if you have a similar character or story – there are varients to make it unique on its own – a grouping of card games is a grouping of card games, and even if i selected 10 different solitaire types, it just seems to cross or border on that to much of the same thing line.

So now comes the time where I decide where to go next.  Do I:

• Continue to develop the game as I originally intended if for nothing else to extend my knowledge, most likely not complete the entire process of submitting it as a full XNA game for the marketplace
• Morph it into a new idea – one of which Trapper has discussed with me somewhat related to a solitaire setup
• Scrap it and just hope that I can forge and execute my next idea before someone else gets the jump on me again?

In reality I had a feeling it was bound to happen as I was just getting my feet wet in game development at all and as stated above it wasn’t some completely new ground breaking IP that I came up with on my own destined to rise to the top of the community games world, but it still was a bit of a saddening blow to see exactly what I seriously considering releasing as an XNA game show up on the marketplace – and moments before I was planning on spending some time on that very project.

Every once in a while I get a question about code from a friend, or even from strangers. Sometimes it is code that I commonly use, sometimes its completely off in left field, but it’s almost always fun to try and figure it out. This got me thinking that I could throw together some samples, answers to those questions, or just random code ramblings here on the blog for you all to laugh at, learn from, or completely ignore. Whatever the case this is the home of those postings. So I just slapped together the code sample.

Consume 360voice Public API via Classic ASP [View Sample]
It is probably no suprise that many of the questions I get are related to working with the APIs over at 360voice and GamerDNA – so I figured those were a good place to start.

Check It Out

What other samples and/or languages would you guys want to see? If there is enough interest in this kind of thing I’ll try and make it a regular thing.

So I have always had this dream/desire/hope/wish to be a game developer, will I ever get there?  Who knows….making something as serious as Gears of War 2 – very unlikely, but who knows maybe one day I’ll have something interesting for people to play with.  Either way, I pretty much live and breath code in about any language I can get my hands on – so I am enjoying the ride either way.

After playing around with creators club, reviewing some tutorials, guides and forum threads I decided to give building a game from scratch a shot.  My selection was not perhaps the most interesting of games, I mean everyone has solitaire on the computer all ready – but I figured a card game could be a nice starting point.

Being my first attempt, I might have not done things in the most logical or useful way – but its functional, and I expect the knowledge to grow as time goes on.  As I sit here looking at the final working product I am rather amazed at what is involved in something as simple as creating a game of solitaire.  I say final working product, but in reality it isn’t final. As I sit here and took a few screen shots for this posting I all ready spotted a small glitch that I want to fix – and all ready thinking of more things I could add.

It’s actually a pretty interesting process, one that seems to never be finished.   I have a few other game ideas spinning in my head, and I am bugging friends to come up with some better ideas – maybe one day I will come up with something that makes its way to the Community Games.  Perhaps a bit lofty of a goal – but who knows.

So far this is only functional on windows (as I am not ready to commit to paying for an XNA subscription without something perhaps useful enough to share with everyone) and would require the XNA framework to be installed.  Maybe as I have some spare time and continue to work on it I will provide a download link if people actually want such a thing.

For now, how about some screen shots – again very basic but functional (you should have seen it before i made it somewhat pretty!

[Show as slideshow]

That’s right folks, with the recent news at work I feel its almost required I cut back what I can at least for now.  So perhaps not the end, but both my Tabula Rasa and Warhammer online accounts have been been put on hold for now.  In all reality I keep busy enough with various projects and console gaming that I don’t get to play them nearly enough to be paying monthly anyway – but I really enjoyed both of them and liked to play them when I could.  I kept my subscriptions so that was possible.

As some of you know, my company decided to take a unique approach to the economic problems most businesses face these days.  Instead of selecting whatever number of individuals they needed to trim to cut expenses, they decided to ’share the pain’ (their words not mine) with the entire staff – that is to say we all recieved a 20% pay reduction.  To be completely fair, it was a 20% reduction in the time at work as well – I now have an extra day off of the day job.  All in all a bit of a shock to the system, one which made me think I really should think about what I can do to cut back and save or pay off debts, especially when who knows when things will get better, or worse.

Now of course let me say I know I am not the first that has been impacted by the current state of the economy and sadly I doubt I will be the last but it is my blog so I can rant from time to time if I want.  Do I think that this was the right choice for them to make?  Well honestly I am not in the postion to make that call.  I am sure it wasn’t an easy decision to make either.  I can say that I don’t love it, some might have even said I overreacted at first, but looking back I guess I am happy I still have the 80% left.  Some people I know have not been as lucky in recent times.

So even though I have an extra day off as I continue to fill that day with things to do – I will miss my Tabula Rasa (so close to finally making 30 and selecting my final class selection!) and Warhammer (I barely got to know you), but I have hope I will be back soon enough. 

Truth be told, you probably will see me on Xbox Live from time to time on that day off (Monday)- and you can guarantee I will have a few more hours to dedicate to 360voice and GamerDNA development.  Which my friends, is what I like the call the silver lining of this cloud.

As my wife said this might have been a sign, we will get through it, and who knows maybe I will end up coming out on top from this challenge in the end.

I was just browsing the GamerDNA forums, and one thread caught my eye, not the title really, but the contents.  This guy must be the current day MacGuyver

There you have it his very own hand build lancer – i wonder if he could make that shotgun foot my buddy Ymiris wanted to have attached when he broke his leg.

I have been Avatar…ized! That’s right I made it in on the second wave of NXE previews.  I actually didn’t even notice the email but got a prompt for a system update when I was booting GoW2.  After it completed I noticed the email in my box saying it would be coming. I have to admit, I originally signed up to just give it a shot, and see what it was all about – but I wasn’t super excited to get my hands on it or anything.  I think I have said in the past that console updates don’t get me hot under the collar for the most part – but I have to bite my tongue.  The new features and sexy look make me happy I got my hands on it early. I am actually considering going back to netflix, just for the online streaming (changed to blockbuster online a while back), and the interface just seems to function a ton smoother, but who am I kidding if you really care about the update, you all ready read all about it on 10 news sites – you dont need me to drone on on my blog about it.

Gears of Goodness War 2 Secondly I went out and got Gears of War 2 at the midnight release in my area.  It was pretty quiet – the biggest news from the night was the kid behind me won a free Halo 3 Legendary edition for wearing a Gears of War shirt to the event.  So apparently it does in fact pay to be “that guy”, you know the one that wears the band t-shirt to the concert of said band.  My hat goes off to everyone involved with Gears 2 though – seriously.  I haven’t completed the campaign as of yet, but I have been completely blown away by it every moment so far – and the multiplayer experience has been amazing as well.  The horde mode gets intense, again I haven’t gotten high enough to really gauge this – but it turns into complete mayhem quick – and I love every minute of it.

Well that’s it for now, those two things made such an impact I felt like taking a moment to pimp them out – I expected both to be good, but they surpassed my expectations on so many levels.  I have been tooling around with XNA here and there when I have some free time – so depending on what comes of that I might post up some samples or something.  It will probably be quite some time before I even consider having something thats worthy of the Community Games on Xbox Live – but game development was always a childhood dream of mine – and even if nothing comes of it, I enjoy tinkering. Speaking of tinkering – I have been playing around a bit with some new signatures heavily based on 360voice data & avatars – heres a quick sample – what do you think?

I am going to get cranking away on some code my current GamerDNA and 360voice projects again – and with luck some more Gears 2 soon…very soon

I don’t normally dress up for Halloween but this year I decided to give it a shot.  I didnt dress up as some ghoul, ghost, or random famous person – this year I decided to dress up as one of the other programmers here at work.  Granted he is not just any co-worker, he is a bit unique.  I should have photos later, but here is a video clip of me in the costume, and then him as himself.

Did I pull it off?  Was it close?  Everyone in the office instantly knew what/who I was and it instigated tons of gut busting laughter – so mission complete.  That alone would have been enough, but I ended winning the costume contest – so $50 worth of Olive Garden doesn’t hurt.