fridayforward

Microsoft's surprisingly strong E3

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:58:00 +0000

In the lead up to this year's E3, Microsoft were touting that their press conference would be "game changing". While I it wasn't up there with Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone, fanboys around the world would have been shocked when Square Enix announced Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360.

The bulk of the presentation centred around the new Xbox Experience, integral to which is a complete dashboard overhaul. Microsoft have unsurprisingly chosen a different direction for the new dashboard interface to that proposed by the community but are clearly listening to Xbox Live's now over 12 million members. Looking like a close relation of the Windows Media Centre dashboard, Microsoft do not hide the fact that the new Xbox 360 interface is aimed squarely at the living room family audience. The introduction of 'avatars' might be a natural extension of gamerpics but on the face of it look like Nintendo's Miis with a few more polygons.Identity and community have always been integral to the Xbox Live experience - something Microsoft has excelled at - and they are taking this further in the dashboard overhaul. An integrated 8-player party system means players can team up with their friends across games, media and chat. The idea of consuming media with your friends virtually is something many people have investigated (including me during my time at BBC R&D) and it will be interesting to see if the Xbox implemtation will work. I simply don't use my 360 in that way so am skeptical at the moment but a cross-game party system should benefit casual and hardcore gamers alike.

It was a safe bet that Microsoft would continue to probe the newly expanded casual game market. Their challenge is making the Xbox 360 the platform of choice for everyone while keeping die-hard Halo fans happy. Not easy. But by stealing long-standing PlayStation exclusives from Sony, grabbing exclusive downloadable content from cross-platform titles and showing some awesome new Gears of War 2 footage, I think the Xbox's core audience will see this as a strong showing too.

Time for Dashboard 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:37:00 +0000

I'm sure its obvious to most Xbox 360 owners that the dashboard (originally developed by AKQA) is in need of a comprehensive re-design. There is simply too much content in Marketplace for the current format to work and de-listing poorly selling Live Arcade titles won't really help. Having not spent any time with Sony's XMB interface in the PS3 I can't say whether they've done a better job but their redesigned PlayStation Store certainly looks a lot more inviting than Xbox Live Marketplace. The Fanboy's excellent take on what Dashboard 2.0 (or perhaps the '2008 Fall Update'?) could look like is probably a step too far for Microsoft but then there are rumours they may be developing something even more ambitious. Roll on E3.

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Adobe to publish flash file format specs [via R/WW]
With Microsoft pushing Silverlight, Adobe have some competition and want to get flash on as many platforms as they can.

45 blog designs [Smashing Magazine]
I'm in the process of migrating to Wordpress and am looking for inspiration for my template design. Some good stuff here.

GTA IV / Xbox 360 TV Spot

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:46:00 +0000

The GTA IV hype machine continues to gear up for its release and Microsoft clearly want to make the most of what could be a USD400 million launch week. When the hype is this well produced keep it coming I say... but roll on Tuesday :)

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:10:00 +0000

Voting over, Ashley Highfield's successor is chosen
Ian Forrester takes it by a nose. Not that it actually matters (Matt...)

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:21:00 +0000

AS3 coding conventions
Worth a read. Some stuff in there I haven't been doing :/ [via BIT-101]

BBC Sound Index
Marketed under the BBC Switch banner, Sound Index attempts to build charts of the most popular artists using social networking sites. The idea has been kicking around for a while and under the primary-coloured exterior there lies a lot of data which will hopefully be opened up. Its in beta at the moment so will be interesting to see how it develops.

Run-time class and asset sharing across multiple SWFs in Flex (AS3)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:35:00 +0000

I have recently ported some Flash 8 widgets to AS3 for use in a prototype site we will be launching in the next few weeks. The widgets are all quite simple, displaying graphs, but became fairly heavy due to an embedded font and graphics. All told the four SWFs totalled over 300K so I decided to do some optimisation.

Sharing library assets and classes at run-time means the user can download (and cache) the library SWFs once and use them across the visible SWFs in the page. Doing so has reduced the total footprint to under 100K and has the added bonus of meaning I can change the font for example without having to re-compiled the visible SWFs.

Sharing simple assets

For some of the widgets, access to remote assets was required from more than one class. To achieve this, I wrapped the asset and embedded font classes in classes with static access:
The static asset access class looks something like this:


packagae com.fridayforward.sharedAssets
{
    public class Library
    {
        private static _callback:Function;
        private static _assets:LoaderInfo;

        public static function init(callback:Function, url:String="../shared/assets.swf"):void {

            // set callback function
            _callback = callback;

            // load assets
            var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);
            var loader = new Loader();
            loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
            loader.load(request);

        }

        private static function onLoaded(event:Event):void {

            // retrieve assets
            _assets = LoaderInfo(event.target);

            // callback
            _callback();
        }

        public static function getAsset(id:String):Sprite {
 
            // return asset class
            var c:Class = _assets.applicationDomain.getDefinition(id) as Class;
            return Sprite(new c());
        }
    }
}

The assets are loaded in the application constructor, with a callback to continue once assets are available:


package
{
    import com.fridayforward.sharedAssets.Library;

    public class Application
    {
        public function Application():void {

            // load assets
            Library.init(init);

        }

        private function init():void {

            // now have access to asset library

            // continue with application...
            
        }
    }
}

The assets can then be accessed from anywhere within the application:


var myAsset:Sprite = Library.getAsset("MyAsset");
addChild(myAsset);

This worked nicely for sharing simple assets but I also wanted to share embedded fonts used in TextFields. To do this, I created a separate AS3 application which contains a class that embeds any fonts I want to share and creates TextFields using them. This class is then made available through a static class to all parts of my applications.

The static Text class looks something like:


packagae com.fridayforward.sharedFonts
{
    public class Text
    {
        private static _callback:Function;
        private static _textField:Object;

        public static function init(callback:Function, url:String="../shared/embeddedFonts.swf"):void {

            // set callback function
            _callback = callback;

            // load assets
            var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);
            var loader = new Loader();
            loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
            loader.load(request);

        }

        private static function onLoaded(event:Event):void {

            // retrieve assets
            var tfClass = event.target.applicationDomain.getDefinition("EmbeddedTextField") as Class;
            _textField = new tfClass();

            // callback
            _callback();
        }

        public static function textField(text:String, size:uint, color:uint=0, ...):TextField {
 
            // pass to EmbeddedTextField object
            return TextField(_textField.textField(text, size, color, ...));
        }
    }
}

The root class of the EmbeddedText application simply acts as a wrapper to allow access to the contained EmbeddedTextField class:


packagae
{
    import com.fridayforward.sharedFonts.EmbeddedText;

    public class EmbeddedText extends Sprite
    {
        public var embeddedTextField;

        public function EmbeddedText():void { }
    }
}

The EmbeddedTextField class provides the functionality to create TextFields:


packagae com.fridayforward.sharedFonts
{
    import flash.text.AntiAliasType;
    import flash.text.TextField;
    import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;
    import flash.text.TextFormat;
    import flash.text.TextFormatAlign;

    public class EmbeddedTextField
    {
        [Embed(source="/Users/bowlec02/Library/Fonts/VAG Rounded BT.ttf", fontName="VAG", mimeType="application/x-font")]
        private var vagFont:Class;

        public function EmbeddedTextField():void { }
  
        public function textField(text:String, size:uint, color:uint=0, ...):TextField {

            var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
            format.font = "VAG";
            format.size = size;
            format.color = color;

            var tf:TextField = new TextField();
            tf.text = text;

            return tf;
        }
    }
}

This is then accessed in the same way as before:


package
{
    import com.fridayforward.sharedFonts.Text;

    public class Application
    {
        public function Application():void {

            // load assets
            Text.init(init);

        }

        private function init():void {

            // continue with application...
            addChild(Text.textField("Application Title", 20, 0));
        }
    }
}

If you have a large library of assets you need to load it might be a good idea to display a preloader while waiting for them to download.

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:26:00 +0000

Super Mario in 14kB Javascript
That pretty much sums it up: someone has recreated (some of) Super Mario Bros in a very small amount of JavaScript. Amazing.

BBC Innovation Labs

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:37:00 +0000

Every time I start to contemplate leaving the BBC (its 5 and a half years and counting) I get the opportunity to participate in something which I I probably wouldn't get the chance to elsewhere. In the past it has been an inspiring conference and last week it was representing BBC Audio & Music Interactive as commissioner at the Innovation Labs in the North West of England.Having shortlisted 10 proposals pitched across Future Media & Technology and Vision disciplines, the teams of 'professional creative technologists' (as the Labs' about page describe them) spent a week developing their idea and their presentation techniques. Half-way through the week we, the commissioners, joined them and helped them to focus their pitch before presenting them on Friday morning.

While only a few of the proposals were commissioned on Friday, both the independent companies and the BBC gain a great deal from the process. It was a great opportunity to meet people from across BBC Future Media & Technology and Vision (it is a big place after all) and discuss problems and ideas with creative people from the commercial sector. The teams themselves gained as much from each other as they did from the organisers and leave (at the very least) with a small pile of business cards in their back pockets.

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:08:00 +0000

Why People Don't Finish Games Anymore
We're older and don't have so much time to spend completing the latest Japanese RPG; frustrating game design; RRoD... Another reason for Xbox Live Achievements :-)

Download MP3s from Amazon in GTA IV
So so cool, although I'm surprised Sony and Microsoft haven't demanded a cut...

Radio and videogames: nobody does it like GTA

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:20:00 +0000

Check out some of the radio stations you'll be listening to in Grand Theft Auto IV. I just hope they bring back petsovernight.com :-)

Roll on April 29th!

Resonate

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 15:07:00 +0000

Last month, Tom Kershaw and I worked on a project for Silent Studios called Resonate. Resonate represents the studio's music services and the web site showcases it very nicely, accompanied by some beautiful illustrations.The site is written in AS3 and uses a page template structure so that any additional pages or structure changes can be done very easily. If you look closely when you load the site or resize your browser window, you should spot my favourite feature: the lines slowly redraw to the edges :-)

Scrobble your BBC Radio listening

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:50:00 +0000

Last year I wrote a Yahoo Widget which allows you to listen to BBC Radio and scrobble the tracks to your Last.fm profile.The Last.fm profiles for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra are now public (they were originally created under pseudonyms), so I thought I should update my widget and also write a version for OS X Dashboard. So I did.

You can read more about them on the BBC Radio Labs blog which accompanies our new Radio Labs site.

Or you can download them here:

Download for OS X
Download for Yahoo! Widgets (version 4.5 or higher required)

These are still in beta (and may never be otherwise) so please let me know if/when you find any glaring bugs!

Radiohead on vinyl

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:40:00 +0000

As a fairly avid Radiohead fan, while most people were downloading In Rainbows for a few pence, I bought the £40 discbox release. After a month's spent listening to the MP3s, I finally got my hands on the discbox this week which contains an additional CD, lyrics, artwork and the standard In Rainbows album on vinyl.In my teens and through university I went through a period of buying vinyl if I possibly could. My collection doesn't extend far beyond a few DJ Krush and DJ Shadow albums and I haven't bought anything new for several years, until the In Rainbows discbox arrived. I literally blew the dust off my Dual turntable (once I had moved our 3ft plastic Christmas tree which was sat on top), fiddled around with the phono and earth cables, found the power adapter, pulled out one of the Radiohead 45s and turned the volume up very high.My Dual is not great and could do with a new cartridge and Thom Yorke may have been sped up a little but the sound blew me away once again. Its incredible that a needle tracking the bumps in a piece of plastic can produce such a warm and accurate recreation of the original recording. The whole album sounded larger somehow with a much wider sound stage and the beautiful finale Videotape sounded especially rich and delicate.

I'm no purist but listening to vinyl does make you realise that the digital era comes with some very significant compromises. I'm not about to ditch my AAC collection and having my whole music collection in my pocket is quite incredible but I certainly won't be letting the dust gather so much from now on.

Doodle Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:05:00 +0000

During the summer I spent a few weeks looking into XNA because I decided if I love playing video games so much maybe I should try writing one. After few trips on the train reading XNA Game Programming, I realised I should stick to what I know and try building something in Flash first. The result is Doodle Wars, a simple Geometry Wars style shooter.I plan on tidying up the code and doing a post about how the game works, because in writing it I have learned a great deal about how to structure a game - in the end the principles I learned from XNA proved useful.

So give it a try!

Inspirational Flash on the Beach

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:25:00 +0000

After last year's inaugural conference was hailed as one of 2006's best Flash event, Flash on the Beach 2007 had a lot to live up to. With technical sessions on AS3 from Grant Skinner and Brendan Hall to inspirational sessions from Neville Brody, Brendan Dawes and Robert Hodgin, this year's event proved to be bigger, better and broader. Flash on the Beach especially provides a great opportunity for those of us who prefer writing code to using the pen tool to get some inspiration from some very talented people.

I went to Flash on the Beach having not got my hands dirty with ActionScript for several months. Work has recently revolved around Ruby on Rails and I went with the hope that I would leave Brighton with some new impetus to finish some personal projects and give me some new ideas. In short that's exactly what happened.

There are too many highlights so I'll just talk about a few sessions which I particularly enjoyed... and weren't actually about Flash (shock!)

First, I have to talk about Robert Hodgin, even though the work he showed was all written in Processing. Although I saw more particle systems than anyone needs in three days, Robert's physical modelling videos were by far the most beautiful, especially when driven by music (although the actual video he presented isn't published yet).

Flock of birds from flight404 on Vimeo

Must play with strange attractors and perlin noise...

Rob Chiu also presented some of his portfolio which was comprised of mostly short films created using his still photography and 3D effects in Adobe After Effects. He also does a lot of print work, including the artiwork for the .Net magazine article in which our BBC API featured.

There were lots of inspirational sessions (alongside AS3 sessions which taught me something knew) at this year's conference but I don't want this post to become a Flash on the Beach love-in so I should close. And I haven't even mentioned Papervision. Perhaps when I finally get my arse in gear and do something with it, when v2.0 is released... In short, roll on September for Flash on the Beach 2008.

BBC Web API: Officially the 18th best API in the world

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:59:00 +0000

According to the latest issue of .Net magazine at least. That's a whole place higher than Twitter! Naturally Google Maps and Flickr take the top spots, but 18th place for our back-of-an-envelope prototype is something I'm immensely proud of.

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:52:00 +0000

Sony has introduced a new cut-price and cut-featured PS3
And I thought Microsoft had confused the issue by selling Xbox 360's with and without hard drives. The new 40GB PS3 will have limited connectivity and no backward compatibility and will sell for £300. I guess so long as the games play exactly the same it doesn't matter..?

After raking in USD 300 Million from Halo 3, Bungie and Microsoft part ways
Up until today Bungie studios was wholly-owned by Microsoft Game Studios but will now once more be independent. MGS owns the IP for the Halo franchise and Microsoft 'will retain an equity interest in Bungie' but the studio will be able to work on projects of their own choosing.

Radio Pop, Olinda prototypes... its all connected

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 13:42:00 +0000

A few months ago, BBC Audio & Music interactive commissioned a project investigating future forms of physical radio devices. The successful company was Shulze & Webb and now they have finished the feasibility study of their proposal, Matt has posted some information on the project.

The prototype, codenamed Olinda, is essentially a very simple, very social radio; simple in interaction, modular in design. Through the inclusion of a hardware API and additional module, S&W propose to allow users to connect with their friends as they listen to the radio.

To fully achieve this, Olinda requires a web site to connect friends and devices. This is where a once-separate prototype comes in. Radio Pop.

Radio Pop is the result of our latest six week semi-rapid prototyping project in the R&D team. At its core is a database which stores radio listening, upon which we can build various views. By introducing friends lists, schedule information and the ability to simply bookmark, or 'pop', a particular point in time, Radio Pop generates a great deal of information about listening habits. We purposefully kept the database very simple and specified an input and output API so that the repository could be accessed using web and desktop widgets as well as through the Radio Pop web site.

This is only my second Ruby on Rails application (my first will be going live in a couple of weeks for a trial, more on that very soon) and as such it is a little slow. However, the flash graphs we created demonstrate the sort of information a service like this could provide, both historical and live, as demonstrated by my Radio Pop live blog badge:

It is this ability to get live listening information which makes Radio Pop a perfect extension of the Olinda prototype (and vice versa). Olinda will provide a very simple way of listening to what your friends are listening to using Radio Pop as the method of communication. While you listen (using Olinda, through a desktop widgets or through Radio Player), a pulse event is sent to Radio Pop every minute, discretely tracking your activity.

Tristan has much more about the background to Radio Pop and our thinking around it.

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:41:00 +0000

Margaret Robertson, former editor of Edge magazine, gives a personal view of why she plays games
I'm not sure exaclty why I play video games. It could be because I find them a so engaging; I appreciate their technical accomplishment; I just love running round a fantasy world shooting zombies... or just because I can't stop trying to raise my gamerscore...

Gravity Pods

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:36:00 +0000

Keith Peters has provided my first proper 'friday forward' 18 months after registering this domain. I'm in the middle of writing my own AS3 game and Keith's Gravity Pods is the perfect example of what casual, addictive flash games should be about.

A word of warning though, it really is addictive and quite a chanllenge. So much so that I have felt the need to prove my achievement of completing the game. A very productive friday afternoon :-)

Links and things

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:11:00 +0000

Paul Sandoz from Sun writes an interesting post about the RESTful-ness of our BBC Schedule API
I've never claimed to understand all the ins and outs of REST, perhaps now is the time to try..?

iTunes is offering Global Underground's Afterhours Ibiza for £7.99
Not only is that a tenner cheaper than on the high street but you also get an extra 15 tracks... bargain. I've got about half way and its pretty awesome so far.

Hackday... struck by lightning

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 15:02:00 +0000

I may as well make the joke again - Hackday London has certainly gone with a bang. The antenna at Alexandra Palace was struck by lightning shortly after our talk finished, resulting in the fire safety system to automatically open the roof vents. Not ideal when its raining!

A couple of hours later and we are back in the hall. The slides from our presentation are now available (minus album covers, sorry) in PDF and HTML. This server also holds the various feeds and APIs from BBC Audio & Music interactive (for Hackday at least). You can find it at http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org. Be sure to check out our music labeling game, code-named Moose 6 and let me know what you think, I'll be talking more about it later.

Things to make and do at Hackday

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:53:00 +0000

I've put the finishing touches on our slides for our presentation tomorrow and am now starting to feel the nerves. The photos tagged with HackdayLondon on Flickr have reminded me of the last time I went to Alexandra Palace - about 15 years ago for a computer fair!

I've been reading posts from everyone joining us and its really exciting. If you're coming, see you there!

Playing with Nabaztag

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Bowley) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:24:00 +0000

We've had a Nabatag bunny sitting in front of us for a few months and a couple of weeks ago it founds its way into a project we built as part of a physical prototyping workshop. As Tristan wrote, we used Randolf (our bunny) as the face of our Zoltar Bunny music predictor. By swiping objects across a special plate (read: RFID reader), Zoltar would recommend you music (read: query Last.fm's AudioScrobbler API). The result made its way onto the Nabaztag blog.

Nabaztag are also sponsoring this weekend's Hackday London. I'm am currently putting the slides together for our presentation. Any suggestions for appropriate album covers...? :-)