Just a quick note really.  As you may or may not be aware, I really, really like A Perfect Circle.  Whilst everyone was waiting for a new Tool album, Mer De Noms really appeared out of nowhere and became, at least to me, one of the most unique albums of its time.

Billy Howerdell, founder / main writer behind A Perfect Circle is working on a new project at the moment called Ashes Divide.  Horrible horrible name.  The music however?  A Perfect Circle without Maynard James Keenan.  Billy performs vocals, guitar and bass on the debut CD “Keep Telling Myself It’s Alright” and “checking to see if the album has appeared on the Internet” is rapidly becoming my favourite hobby at the moment in the run up to it’s April 8th release.  Suffice to say, I have a very large amount of anticipation and faith riding on this CD being something worthwhile.

The first single “The Stone” was released to radio a month or two ago, actually being a re-mastered and re-paced version of an early APC demo known as “Army”, with some lyrics added and the tone lightened ever so slightly.  Happy rock this is not, but while a little different in tone to the darker demo it’s a good, excellently produced lead single.  That said, today samples of the entire album appeared on amazon and thankfully I’m still just as excited as I was.  Really reminds me of Mer De Noms, and if it’s anywhere near as good it’ll probably be the best thing you’ll hear this year.

A Perfect Circle – The Hollow (Live on Letterman)

Ashes Divide – The Stone (the link refuses to embed)

I was over at a close friends last evening and he inadvertently reminded me that I’d always meant to pick up a graphics tablet, especially since my scanner exploded about 8 months back, but I’d never really had the inclination or motivation to do so.  So anyway, this evening I picked up a Wacom tablet after work, and I’m really very impressed.

Incredibly derivative (of myself) and entirely uninspired, but I just doodled that familiar shape as a little bit of an experiment.  Just to see how it felt.  Very very happy with the results, it really could’ve just been pen inked and scanned and with any luck it’ll give me that bit of a kick to finish off a few projects I’ve had in the works for what literally must be years now.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading around Microsoft Surface recently, I’ve got some amazing ideas and concepts for the platform presuming they manage to make a consumer oriented product in the next 2-3 years.  I’m probably going to start concepting out some software and a few little spikes now.  May well be my next “big thing” and I hope to drive my career in that direction over the next couple of years.  It’s just WPF, C# and Vista in the end…

Now Playing: The Cavalera Conspiracy – Dark Ark

Click through for the page / full image.  It’s taken me a little bit longer than I hoped but I guess I had to get in to the right place in my head to be creative.  This one’s just a digital painting really, my scanner died a little while back.  Two more works in progress, but they’ll take significant effort until I manage to capture the atmosphere I’m after.

I finished this up whilst listening to the acoustic and abridged version of “The Sky Moves Sideways” by the Porcupine Tree EP “We Lost The Skyline”, and I think it compliments it nicely, captures the mood at least.

Now Playing: Porcupine Tree – The Sky Moves Sideways

Microsoft research labs put a distribution and the source of Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/) online today. 

Singularity is an academic project to produce a micro-kernel based managed operating system and makes for decent reading.  They’re trying to produce an operating system with as much of the core written in managed languages as possible, and the source is definitely interesting, if somewhat intimidating, to poke around in.  Purely academic for the moment, as it’s the sort of technology that’ll probably not see use in mainstream operating systems / Windows for probably about half a decade yet, but it’s quite nice to see a bootable sample and source laying the foundations of a secure operating system that isn’t the quagmire presented to us by modern *nix clones.

An interesting academic footnote more than anything, but it’s definitely cool.

I wrote an exceptionally lengthy piece on creating clever self hosted Windows services using IOC techniques and Windsor containers a few posts back.  Unfortunately the example application was a little half hearted, none-compiling and potentially difficult to grasp.

I’ve repackaged up the sources as a working solution for your pleasure.  I’ve made a few tweaks here and there but the code is largely unchanged.  The upside to this distribution is that you can just compile and reference the CommunicationsManager dll and include it in your projects, stick a few lines of configuration in app.config, three lines of code, and you have a self hosted WCF service.

I’ll skip on reiterating past detail, but suffice to say, you’ll need to go download the Windsor components from castleproject.org, and if you’re smart, nUnit.

Download GenericWCFServer2.zip

Now Playing: Nine Inch Nails – 31 Ghosts IV

Definitely the right thing to do, both as a listener, buyer, and artist.

When Trent Reznor releases an instrumental double album, you really should pay attention.  Especially when it’s only £2.50.

Now Playing: Nine Inch Nails – 7 Ghosts I

http://www.insecticidethegame.com/

Looks frankly awesome.  Apparently Crackpot entertainment is staffed by classic era LucasArts developers, so crime and corruption in the land of the dead bugs.. sounds and looks fantastic.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21/microsoft_goes_open/

http://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/prnewswire/press_releases/national/Washington/2008/02/21/AQTH065

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/interoperability/default.mspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216514.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216513.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197979.aspx

I don’t think I can explain the benefits these actions could have as they’re so wide and varied.  I’m not mistaking them for pure altruism, however for a Microsoft platform developer, I’m incredibly excited by today’s news of opening up API’s and providing comprehensive internal documentation.  I had a quick flick through some of the documentation available already, on the day of announcement, and it seems to be of high quality and revolving around key windows properties.

Happy times!

I finally finished off Mass Effect today (my first play through).  I don’t think I’ve played a game in a long time that was so good, that as soon as I finished it, I immediately started it again on a higher difficulty.  Absolutely brilliant.  Bioware have managed, in single game, what many authors, film makers and TV writers fail to do over a period of years.  They crafted a fantastic cast of characters that you empathise with and grow with, they give you at least the fantastic illusion of choice as to the fate of these characters, and they’ve created an epic science fiction story that doesn’t feel stale and familiar. 

The plot isn’t the most original science fiction I’ve ever seen, but in a genre that’s done to death, they keep it believable, with a few moments that really catch you off guard.  The first section of the game actually sees a RPG developer create a reasonably freeform game without grind and full of personality and variety, whilst the final act or two of the game features at least one brilliant “oh shit” moment where you discover who the real antagonist of the game is, and then steps the action up by not coping out with a happily ever after ending.  The dialogue throughout is an absolute joy, the choices the player is presented with are realistic and genuinely difficult at times (mostly due to the empathy you develop for your colleagues), the visuals are stunning and the action is well balanced and paced.  I was especially pleased with the way Bioware merged real time combat and RPG “stop motion” combat, it felt fluid and fun.  It’s not quite Gears of War duck and cover action, but when you get to just blow the crap out of everything it plays well and is suitably rewarding.

It’s not without faults, the inventory management is a bit flaky, the AI occasionally makes you shoot it in the back of the head by running through gunfire and using the default character setup it seems like you can become a little too powerful towards the end of the game if you play the side missions correctly (top tip, max out AI hacking on one of your team members as early as you can, and any big nasty Geth become your big nasty Geth), but all of these are tiny flaws in possibly the best game I’ve played on the xbox360 so far.  If you like science fiction, adventure, action or just an excellent RPG, please please buy this game.  It’s apparently the first in a trilogy that are designed to be released over the life span of the xbox360 and I personally can’t wait.

As a non-gameplay note, the music from the ending credits of Mass Effect made me pay attention.  A band I’d never heard of called “Faunts”, the song appears to be from an EP and I’ve sneakily found it on youtube (and the Mass Effect OST).

On a (slightly) different note, I went to see Cloverfield tonight and enjoyed that too.  I expected roughly what I got, the “Chulhu Witch Project”.  The acting was all really convincing, the effects were top notch and the atmosphere was great.  Enjoyed it for what it was.

In summary?  Mass Effect is one of the best games and stories I’ve ever played, and Cloverfield is mighty entertaining.  Hope you’re all well x

I’ve been poking around recently looking into how plausible game development really is in C#.  I’m sure a lot of the old C/++ people will regard this as heresy, but I’ve had my fill of C++.

I spent a few hours a weekend or two ago writing a managed wrapper for Lame (“ain’t an MP3 encoder” lame…) and my first reaction was something like “who wrote this crap”.  A little premature in all honesty, because Lame certainly isn’t badly written but it’s definitely a product of 1990s mathematical programming.  The physical layout left something to be desired and it just reminded me how tiresome old coding conventions were before intellisense let people makeUpVariableNamesTheLengthOfWarAndPeace without having to worry about having to retype that damn string 1322747 times.  I’m sure people would argue that a sensibly placed x, y or z may look nicer than the longVariableNameOfYourChoice, but it’s certainly less descriptive and far more irritating to maintain or port a decade later.  Anyhow, I (obviously) digress, Lame isn’t badly written, just old fashioned.

So C# game development (as I really have no desire to use C++)… leads me to the XNA framework and disappointment number two of the same weekend.

Regardless of the Visual Studio 2008 RTM hitting before the RTW of XNA (TLA heaven!) they apparently have chosen to leave out 2008 support until an incremental upgrade.  Seeing as I’ve just attempted to move everything I work on in my own time into .Net 3.5 and not have to maintain two copies of a binary compatible development environment on my machine, the lack of support for VS2008 is more than a little off putting.  I’ve not actually reinstalled VS2005 to try out XNA yet, so unfortunately my experience with XNA ended there.  I’m sure I’ll get round to it, because I went on regardless and wrote the basis of a game engine for a real time Worms-esq game in C#.

Gives me a little bit of hope, with the Xbox360 and XNA providing what appears to be a unified platform, if Microsoft get their shit together quickly enough they could actually formalise console homebrew in a way that’s genuinely beneficial to them and not just their least favourite users who enjoy Xbox media centre and other “original xbox” gems.

I’ve never done any DirectX programming, so my game engine (which was written largely on a train to and from London) doesn’t have anything that actually resembles a UI at the moment, just a set of classes, interfaces and tests.  Left me feeling like that task is definitely plausible, .Net benchmarks very very well these days (near unnoticeable performance hits over native code), we’re out of the dark ages and if Microsoft manage to wrap the DirectX API into something really nice in XNA, game development might be able to come kicking and screaming out of the dark ages too.

I’m sure that’ll make people developing for Sony and Nintendo’s platform very happy, but I guess the C++ developers still need to get work too in the land of pointer arithmetic and honey…