One of my photographs has been used in an updated iPhone application. Check it out here:http://www.schmap.com/?m=iphone#uid=london&sid=shopping_markets&p=56307&i=56307_132 Note that it's the one by "Ian Munro" and not RetroCoder :)

After a few months of hard work I've managed to pass the second amateur radio exam. I also got 100% in this one !

I'm the one on the left Vince, the one with lots of hair :)

One of my London photos has been short-listed

I’ve just had one of my photographs short-listed for the next addition of the Schmap London Guide(http://www.schmap.com/). I find out on May 14th if it’ll be used. Checkout my recent London snaps here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22697919@N05/

Me and my Amateur Radio certificate

Picture of me collecting my Amateur Radio certificate: http://www.g0mwt.org.uk/training/photos/p-found.htm

Another year gone

Well, I’ve been a bit slack when it comes to writing on my blog. A year has gone past and I’ve been very busy but with the day job and not the fun stuff. All my projects have been put on hold and I only found a little bit of time to create a new website. I have big plans but will struggle to fit it all in. With the release of dot net 4 and Visual Studio 2010 I’m currently waiting for the new release of the XNA framework. I plan to use this as my development environment as it fits in with my paid work. As much as I enjoy using Delphi, I just don’t use it at work anymore and find it difficult to continually swap between this and C#. If you haven’t visited my new website yet then pop along and take a look. It’s still work-in-progress so some of the features don’t work yet. I’ll be adding items as I get time, some of which may well be Silverlight. I will also try to get some more blog entries finished before the end of the month. These will outline what I plan for the last two quarters of the year.

A week at London

Too much to do at home and at work so no time to work on my games. The next few months look to be even busier so I don’t expect to get much work done on my “Dave the Dog” game. I have been able to fix the code so I can now walk between multiple screens. I had to add extra data to the XML document to handle the different entry points as Dave moves between screens. On the plus side, my company has just employed a graphic artist so I’ll have to ask him if he’ll be interested in drawing a few graphics for me. Next week I’ll be at Dev Week in London. If your going then may be I’ll see you there. The short train journey into London should give me time to plan the next stage of the game. I’m thinking of writing the code to collect, drop and use items. These items will be placed “randomly” so I’ll need to plan how I’m going to do this and how to keep track of the items as I drop or use them.

Dave throws a bone !

I'm now spending most of my time developing C# applications so I haven't had much free time to work on my "Dave" game. Shown below is the latest video showing how far the game has developed. I hit a few problems with the collision detection mainly due to the diagonal movement of the "grannies". I decided to just let them move in the more normal left, right and up, down style. I had always thought that in the finished game they would probably not just stay in the current screen but actually walk around the whole map, going into the shops and houses etc. This more linear movement should work better and also allows me to get on with the rest of the game rather than hitting my head on the desk due to diagonal collision problems. The areas that Dave can walk are defined by rectangles and you will see in the video that Dave can walk up to the door. The code just checks that Dave is in (or is moving into) one of the defined rectangles. In the debug mode the rectangles are drawn on the screen which allows me to check that all is as it should be. The last thing that I have added it to allow Dave to throw bones at people (well he is a dog). This works quite nicely but has brought to my attention a small problem that I need to address. At the moment the collision detection is based on the bottom of the bones rectangle in relationship to the other sprites. It should be based on the initial position of Dave's feet (ie, it needs an off set value). It shouldn't be too hard to fix this as long as I can find some time to do it. The next job will be to enable the exits so that I can write the flip screen code. I will probably then look to add the collectable objects and maybe some street furniture and general obstacles. The movement of the sprites in the video isn't very smooth due to my capture program. in "real" life, they move very nicely, even when the screen is windowed rather than full screen.