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Been Busy

October 9, 2008

Whew! Been a busy past 10 days or so, haven't hardly had time to even update this blog at all. Just wanted to post a couple notable things that I've seen lately.


Fable II Co-op patch
It looks as if we will be getting the Co-op patch on or near release day for Fable II which is great. I was really worried that we wouldn't be getting it until a week or 2 later. I'm also a little more relieved by this news as maybe the game won't be lacking the polish I previously thought. It's going to be tough to play the game and forget all of the hype and look at it from a fresh perspective as it is, lots to live up to in this game.

Richard Garriot in Space
Sunday is the big day as Lord British himself will be making his way into space. You can watch live coverage of the launch and ISS docking events on TV if you care to stay up late enough. 2:00 am CST on Sunday is the launch and Tuesday at 3:00 am will have docking coverage. Maybe he'll play some Tabula Rasa from space? Maybe that will boost the failing MMO? Doubtful.

New Xbox Live Experience
It's finally been announced that we will get the new Xbox live experience on Nov. 19th. I'm looking forward to pretty much everything that it has to offer, the avatars are a bit meh and I will not be spending money on getting new "clothes" for it. Actually it might be fun to create the worst looking avatar on the system.

Creative Xdock iPod System
I recently purchased a Creative Xdock iPod system and reciever off woot.com and I have to say it is a pretty cool product. It ran $50 new on Woot, and usually retails for $90 or so getting a main dock and a reciever. Basically the product allows you to wirelessly stream music from one source ipod dock to any number of reciever docks in a 100ft range. It supports a digital out on the base station which I have plugged into my home theater and then the recievers can plug in to a speaker system via RCA or standard mini-jack. There is absolutely no delay in the music transmission and the included remotes work well. I was even able to program my universal remote to work with the system right out of the box which was pretty awesome. If you do any playing of your ipod on a home theater and want to also be able to pump it through your house, this is a great setup and well worth the $50 price if you can find it. The regular sales price is a bit up there, it's a good product, but you really need to be pretty hard up for the solution.

Palin email hacker to face up to 5 years
Man this kid was dumb. I knew this would happen as soon as they announced they were going to get the FBI and secret service involved in the investigation. The guy should have just keep access to the email a secret, done a thorough search for a while, archived anything incriminating and then unleashed his own version of an October surprise to smash the McCain/Palin campaign if that was truly his intent. If he had found anything really bad, people mainly would lose sight of the fact that he hacked the account and maybe even branded him a hero, or if jailed, a martyr. Either way he'd probably end up more famous instead of a soon to be forgotten felon.

More XNA 2.0 Development
I've been working a lot on learning the XNA development framework. So far I like it a lot, the objects are really great and always seem to have the properties I'm looking for in order to accomplish some kind of effect. I'm currently working hard at getting particle systems going and have a pretty good base particle system engine object. I will be trying to refine it a bit and then probably moving on to developing a pac-man game using the knowledge I have just to solidify everything I've learned so far. Back in college I had to write pac-man (then called Slackman) for homework in CSE 142 so all the game rules and everything is old hat. I do get to make it look much nicer with some high quality sprites though. Once I start developing my real game I will start a new blog dedicated to it's development, I'll need a name for it though and that may take the most time to come up with.

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