As I managed to get two months’ Spotify Premium for free via Three UK’s offer (thanks for that!), Spotify are currently back in my good books (for the most part) – and as they’ve just announced their Apps platform, I thought I’d check out their new beta version to see what the deal was.
Spotify has recently introduced a cap on the number of times a user on their free service can listen to a particular song. This really isn’t a good thing!
Despite the physics model in the 2D levels feeling a little off compared to the original Sonic games, I’m really looking forward to getting my copy of Sonic Generations.
Here’s a quick play-through of the “Sky Sanctuary” level, which shows the kind of direction Sonic Team have taken. It’s got a good mix of 3D elements in a predominately 2D play area, with nothing that looks like it detracts from the overall experience. The “Green Hill” level that’s included in the newly-released demo on the Xbox 360 is designed in much the same way.
Hopefully the whole game will be similarly well designed and fun to play.
Well, you lost me right there, Apple.
If this is true (and it looks pretty legit to be honest), HTC needs to get this fixed fast.
This article proved useful when setting up W3 Total Cache on this blog – you might find it useful too!
As part of the induction week for my final year at uni, I’ve been discussing what I could cover as my dissertation project.
I’ve arrived at something suitable with this:
Trees have often been represented in games in a number of different ways, from 2D billboards that rotated to face the camera, to low-poly 3D models in more recent titles. Often, trees will be the same model or billboard posted over and over again, which doesn’t appear convincing!
This project will explore a number of topics related to procedurally generating and representing trees and forests in game titles, with the view to removing such phenomena and making forested environments more convincing. Factors that affect the physical appearance of trees, such as the size, shape, colour and texture of branches, leaves and bark will be considered. External factors such as seasons, environmental effects such as wind and rain, and interactions with other game objects will also be taken into account.
The end result of this project will be a tech demo demonstrating some of these effects, and a report detailing some of the problems the game developer faces when implementing trees in modern games, along with suggestions of how these could be changed and improved.
I’m just waiting on final approval of this from my appointed supervisor, but hopefully this is a go! =D
Just moved my website’s home page over onto HTML5 Boilerplate. For something you can just drop your markup into, it’s pretty sweet – as it takes care of a lot of things for you.
I’ll be using this again in future – yes, even the pink. =p
I since found out that the Optimus 3D is running Android 2.2.
LG: your flagship phone is running software that is at least a year old. The next major Android release is in the next 2-3 months. Get a grip, and get it up to date.
Recently LG have started advertising the Optimus 3D on TV. That, in itself, is fine.
I can’t help but find their advert a little misleading, though:
- There’s only five built-in apps from LG that actually use the 3D technology – it’s standard 2D in Android itself.
- “Dual-core, dual-memory” as a feature. As someone who is still very sceptical of dual-core smartphones (mainly due to the impact on battery life), I’m sure that putting both of these things (and creating a completely unrealistic animation to go with them) is not the way forward.
- After having seen a demo model in my local T-Mobile store, the 3D effect isn’t that good. Even the 3DS seems to have a better 3D effect, despite the smaller screen and lower resolution.
What genuinely puts me off, however, is this: as these devices with 3D screens and dual cameras proliferate, the 3D apps that will inevitably be released to the Android Market will work with one specific device (or range of devices) only – for example, HTC are using their own SDK to cater for third-party 3D applications. It just leads to yet more fragmentation that Google aren’t in any position to deal with at this point.
Thanks, Google, for making them easy to browse, choose and implement.
I’m now using one on my website home page. Literally two minutes to add to the page, and everything looks a little more modern.
Early days yet – but it’s getting there.
This one, I’ve put together from scratch – working with plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Chrome’s developer console has proven invaluable – being able to play with element properties on a live page makes tweaking a CSS design that much quicker, and the console has been invaluable with getting around some of the small JavaScript issues.
Considering this is my first foray into web development, most of which has been learned on-the-go with little prior knowledge, I feel I’ve done okay so far – but, like I say, there’s a way to go yet!
Check out my progress here.
For the 5th time in 6 years, I’ve moved house. This time I’m sharing one with a 3 other guise from the anime society at university. I’ve known them for a few years, so we’re getting on well.
Having moved back to Android from Windows Phone 7 I was expecting things like Google Talk to work flawlessly. Truth is, they don’t – half the time I’ll be signed into Talk on the website, but the phone will be showing all my contacts as offline.
The Xperia Arc isn’t so great either – Sony’s built-in apps are less than fabulous, I often find myself without data, and the proximity sensor doesn’t always work – I’ve hung up on a relatively important 40-minute-long call by complete accident.
Something tells me I’m going to be going back to Windows Phone sooner than expected – as there’s nothing else on the market that I actually want.
