Windows phone port of the remake for Cavern Fighter

Looking forward to developing my Cavern Fighter remake for the Windows phone. The first job was to dig out my old tools and see if I could extract the map data from my Delphi app into something useful. It didn’t take too long for me to use my map making tool to export the data as XML. Now that it is in a more manageable format, I can start to think how It can be used with a new rendering engine. This isn’t going to be a quick project but it makes a change from then day job.

The original level design tool

The original byte data converted into XML

Virgin Racing

My son trying to work out if anyone would spot him giving the car a quick spin. To be honest, Timo Glock shouldn’t have left the keys in the ignition :)

Pit Babes

After an exciting drive up the M1 to Coventry I was presented with the sight of a couple of girls who knew everything about motor sport....

Last exam

I’ve just completed the final amateur radio exam. This was a tricky exam but well worth the effort. My new call sign is M0ZQR, so give me a shout on 2m if you’re able.

mountain biking on tarmac

Whilst enjoying a bit of mountain biking at the weekend, I decided to film a short section of tarmac downhill. The previous week I saw a similar video on youTube but the cyclist crashed spectacularly at the bottom of the hill. I filmed my video using a rubbish phone camera so the resolution isn’t very good. It got a bit extreme near the bottom of the hill as I was riding with just one hand on the handlebars and concerned that vehicles may have been coming from behind or in the middle of the road coming at me… Fortunately I managed to complete the ride without any incidents.

DevWeek 2011

Just back from DevWeek. Three days of quality speakers this time round. Now to put everything I've learnt in to practice. Here are a couple of pictures from the keynote and an excellent session by Ingo Rammer.





This picture was taken from level four of the Barbican. Those stairs are a killer when you start at level -1 !



London wouldn't be London without someone squeezing in another tower block.



Please note that these images were taken on a rather nasty phone camera. Images of London and other places taken by me with a quality camera can be seen here: My Flicker Images

Games for 2011?

Well here we are in 2011. I’d like to say I have big plans for writing some retro games this year but I bet I won’t have much in the way of free time. For years now I’ve been wanting to rewrite Virgin Atlantic Challenge, the game I wrote for the Spectrum at least 25 years ago. I’d like to do it with proper 3D models but that looks to be a beast of a project. More likely is my “Dave the dog” game which I started writing in Delphi. I wasn’t happy with the structure of the classes so I may start again but use XNA and the .net framework. Starting again won’t be as bad as it sounds as a lot of the code I wrote already exists in XNA so no extra work to be done there. The map data and graphics already exist so they too can just slot in. I’d like to get a small demo up and running to get some feedback. Only time will tell how it pans out, so watch this space.