I was expecting it to be much more Mythology style of gameplay, which put me off as I really couldn't get on with Mythology at all. Upon starting the demo I encountered a wow moment, the tune from the AoK playing, bringing back very fond memories! Awesome start. First order of business was going into graphic options and turning everything up, I fire it into a widescreen resolution, wow it really is widescreen!...
Time to boycott Murdoch and his crap, now he's invading the internet by buying the largest game-information network there is. So long Gamespy and IGN see you in my browsers history folder sometime.
I remember seeing some demos of "Avalon" (now dubbed the Windows Presentation Foundation) a while back and was impressed with how simple it is to build up the UI (using XAML), however Microsoft have just released a new video, that is very graphic, I think they were just using Notepad in the one I saw but this actually shows all the changes happening in real time in the little application they put together....
One based on F.E.A.R. due to popular demand, and also one for Omikron, because apparently #2 is coming out. I'd love to do one for X3 Reunion, however I doubt I'd have anywhere near enough time to do a project of that size, let alone play the game itself. Oblivion Portal and Xbox 360 Degrees are doing quite nicely and by the end of the year will no doubt be consuming a large amount of my time....
Well it's £209.99 in the UK, very cheap for a next-generation console and a controller, the full pack at £279.99 isn't too bad either. However making the hard drive non-standard was a very unwise discussion in my opinion and leaves the door open to Sony to include one as standard and gives them ammunition in the fight. But at least in the financial conditions they're in they can't compete on price....
Gamespy: The godfather of modern 3D gaming speaks out about development on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 as well as the tribulations of tomorrow's developers. Carmack's platform of choice for console development is the Xbox 360, and he explained why ... the Xbox 360 was designed to have a very thin API layer. In Carmack's words, he can "basically talk directly to the hardware ... doing exactly what I want....
Well spotted loads of Perseids this year, pretty clear, no Moon, too much light pollution (town of 36000 people) but averaging 40 per hour. This is based on observations between 11:30 (BST) 00:50 with two sets of eyes looking east. Spotted a very weird object, dark-orangy colour about -1 mag appeared in Cassiopeia and travelled through Pegasus all the way to the horizon in about 5-8 seconds. The distance it travelled instantly pops into my mind as a satellite, but doing it that fast and at around 00:30 when I very much doubt the Sun is illuminating any objects in that low of an orbit....
As it was very clear tonight I popped outside at 22:15 (UTC) to spot two Iridium flares. Within seconds (before I even turned the lights out) I spotted a bright flash very high up 80°+ to the west, probably a meteor exploding. Always a good sign. While searching for Iridium 49, scheduled to pass at 22:18:23 which I could not spot, a meteor zipped across the sky, about 10 degrees long passing through the Hercules region of the sky ENE to WSW at around 0 magnitude....
As I don't seem to have any of my images of the transit of Venus on the web, I thought the blog would be as good a place as any to post them. I'm also planning on publishing more of my astrophotography stuff at some point in the future. Most of it needs scanning and my old log book needs modernising and being tied up with the images so it probably won't be for a few weeks....
Ryan Boswell: Honestly, how many people (of all computers users) actually use that piece of junk? [Refering to the Tablet PC] Now now do I smell a jealous little Apple fan? I'm sure there are tens of thousands of Tablet PC users that would like to comment on this on his blog, yet he seems not to have comments or trackbacks... Hmm like so many Apple fans stuck in their own little world....