The component input on our TV is mixing the colours up – I’d noticed this when I got my Xbox360, but since I was connecting it via VGA, I wasn’t that bothered. Then I realised that when I pick up a Wii, I’ll be connecting that via component, and since I’d paid £1000 for the TV, it bloody better work, so an Engineer was dispatched.

This is when I realised that the guy sent to fix my TV didn’t see the difference between a composite and a component connection. Then I remembered someone posing a similar question on an art forum. Could it really be that hard to understand? I explained it to the TV guy, then thought “Hmm, thats was easy, and might make a useful post…”

Lots of people will have consoles that aren’t displaying their games as well as they could be, so I’ve written this to try to help.

Firstly, the most simple thing I can do is just list te connections in order of quality

1. RF/Coaxial
2. Composite
3. Svideo
4. Component (on a Standard-Def TV)
5. RGB Scart (Mainly European)
6. Component (on a Hi-Def TV)
7. VGA
8. HDMI/DVI

The most simple thing you can do is look at your TV to see what connections it accepts, and then you connect your console using an appropriate cable. If you’ve simply read this far and done that, you’ve probably got the best connection you can get. If you want to know WHY some connections are better than others, then read on…

So why are some better than others? It’s really all down to compression, and a lot of that has it roots in television broadcasting.

A video signal contains quite a lot of information – you are sending 50 or so different images every second. These are made up of 3 signals: Red, Green and Blue. With connections like VGA, DVI and HDMI you are sending just that – the RGB signal (along with other information, such as sync rates and perhaps digital audio). HDMI and DVI are both digital signals, which gives you best quality picture you can have since the signal is pure and unaltered.

The VGA connection also sends an RGB signal, however it gets converted to an analogue signal, then back to digital, so you have already introduced a conversion, and therefore you can lose a little clarity.

However, this is a lot of information to transmit, especially over the airwaves (and these signals have their root in TV broadcasting), so over time various methods of compression were used to be able to broadcast them more effectively. The signals get compressed to a faster method for transmission, and then they get reassembled when they are received.

Component, which has a red, a green and a blue cable doesn’t actually carry a pure RGB signal, which is pretty misleading. The Green cable carries a black and white signal, and the Red and Blue cables carry a mix of the colour. The signal gets converted to this efficient format, is transmitted along the cable and then it gets reassembled at the other end. It looks very good, but not quite as good as a pure RGB signal.

Svideo takes the same approach, but goes one step further with the two colour signals – it combines then into one, leaving you with one colour signal and one black and white signal, which is yet another step down, but it is still better than composite…

Composite is the next step down in quality, because it combines all the video signal into one wire (usually yellow). The other two cables (Red and White) carry left and right audio. Yup, 2 cables for audio and one for the picture.

The worst of the lot is RF/Coaxial which hasn’t been on a console for years, would still find it is the default on your SNES or Megadrive. It takes all that video information, and all the audio and compresses it into one tiny cable. This is also the same system most televisions have used for years.

Finally RGB SCART, mainly used only in Europe. I left it to the end cos it throws a bit of a spanner in the works depending on your TV. SCART is type of connector that allows different signals to be sent across it – composite, svideo, RGB and stereo sound. So in theory it should be better than component since it transmits RGB, and it is on standard definition TVs, but not on Hi-Def.

Finally! I knew those 360 Connect guys would come through.

HD video streaming
Connect360 now supports WMV+WMA video sharing, allowing you to stream HD quality video right to your living room!

Yup! just dump you WMV format movies in your Movie folder – job done.

Caveats as always – you need the free Flip4Mac installed (which I described can be used to convert to WMV files (you can’t convert with the free version), and the WMV files need to be in a format the 360 can read.

This took them about 4 weeks to integrate – good going! Buy this product folks – $20 (about £12) well spent.

As a game player, or an artist who modifies games, you will no doubt have heard of an engine in relation to games. However, many people are unaware what an engine actually is, what is does, and how it affects them as an artist. Many people confuse a game engine with the game itself. This is an attempt to explain what a game engine does and why they are used – but to stop this being a novel I’ll approach from the point of view of an artist.

Essentially, an engine is device for collecting, managing and using assets. You put art and sound and logic in one end, and a game comes out the other end.

There you go, that’s that cleared up.

More details?

As I mentioned, many people confuse the engine with the entire game – an engine is not a game, but the core around which a game is written. An engine contains no game, its a layer of abstraction, a layer of processing that sits between the game (fun, story, art, sound, controls) and the hardware.

In the old days games were essentially written for specific hardware. They were one off chunks of code – you came to your next game and you rewrote it from scratch. Quickly programmers built up a library of reusable code, so that, for example, once they written had a good system for handling sprites they could simply copy that code into their next game – perhaps verbatim, perhaps making minor or even major improvements.

Reusing code is a great idea – rather than starting everything from scratch each time, you get a major head start. Soon these little snippets of code build up, and then you realise that playing sound in your last game and playing sound in your next game is the same, it’s only the sounds that are different. Just record the new sounds, bung them in and hey-ho, away we go.

So, rather than writing a game from the ground up each time, an engine provides a core to work around. When developing a game, the artists export their models and textures and animations into a format that the engine can read, as do the sound engineers. The game programmers write a control system that maps buttons presses on a joypad or a keyboard to actions in the game, but the engine does the work of translating the signals from the joypad into something we understand, like ‘Up’ or ‘X Button’.

But what will all those programmers do now that we have engines? Lots of things – they’ll find and fix bugs in the engine. They’ll make the engine run faster. They’ll add new features (and then fix them. And then make them faster). And they’ll even write nice tools for us artists to make it easier to get our artwork out of our heads and into the game.

Hurray for engines!

This weekend saw the launch of the Phantasy Star Online for the Xbox 360 – a week of free play (apart from next Tuesday when Xbox Live goes off for a day for ‘maintenance’). When I got home from work on Friday the demo was ready to grab, so I started the download. Several hours later close to a gig was there, and I started the game.

Well, I tried to. I couldn’t connect. Perhaps the game doesn’t begin until Saturday, I thought, so I tried on Saturday.

I couldn’t connect.

Sunday – no joy.

It seems I’m not the only person with this problem – Joystiq reports the same, and a simple search on Google reveals the same.

I suppose it could be the sheer weight of people trying to get online, but since the game is due to be released in a week this better not be the problem. Except now it has coloured my opinion, making me think the servers won’t be able to cope. Good going Sega – with this and the utter garbage that was released as the Sonic demo you are doing a great job at not selling your games.

Recently I was approached by a group of hobby gamers who wanted me to make some art for a game they were working on (for the record, I have no interest). They tried to persuade me that they were worth working with with the line “…and we’ve built our own engine.”

A few days later I heard the same on MSN, about a small hobby project – “We’ve built our own engine”.

Which made me ask – “WHY?”

If you are a programmer wanting to learn about engines, then by all means, go ahead (although you’ll learn quite a lot just tinkering with existing engines). But if you are a small group of hobbiests wanting to make a game, you really shouldn’t.

Writing engines is hard. Really hard. And there are already so many out there that there is bound to be one that suits your needs, or almost suits your needs without you having to write it all. Some do costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Torque costs $100 for a single license.

You’ll need to write your own tools, and probably exporters. You’ll need to figure out lighting, and memory access, and probably streaming. Oh, and animation systems and directional sound. Input and output routines. I almost forgot about particle systems, and the scripting language to write the actual gameplay with. Oh, did you want network code with that?

You are going to end up writing more engine code than game code.

“But it’s a great way to learn!”

Yes, for one or two people – but what are rest of your team going to do while you hack away for months? Yes, they can make assets, assets that they will not be able to see in game because there is no game yet, because there is no engine to build a game with.

In the end, an engine is a program that maintains the game world, and if you want to make a game, why not concentrate your efforts on making a game? An off the shelf engine will probably suit most of your needs, allowing you to spend more time on the fun stuff.

Thank you to Dino for the phrase I used for the title.

Technorati Tags: Games, programming, engine

A few weeks ago I switched to Windows Live Messenger at work, but I’ve had to switch back to messenger 7.5. WLM doesn’t seem to log me out of my home session when I log in at work. Well, it does, and then sometimes it logs me back in at home.

There have many times when I’d send someone a message whilst at work, and get no reply, only to come home hours later and see their replies on my Messenger on my Mac.

Has anyone else had this happen?

I have no idea if it is a general Windows Live issue, or Windows Live not liking me having a messenger on my Mac, but after switching back to 7.5 the problem is gone, so it doesn’t seem that the issue is with the Mac – but it could be.

Technorati Tags: mac, windows live messenger

You can edit the names of the links in your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, shortening them and therefore allowing more links.

I had a bunch of quick links in my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar – Writely, Bloglines etc. I noticed that the Link name displayed was the title of the website, so for Writely the link was ‘Welcome to Writely’ and Bloglines was ‘Bloglines | My Feeds….’.

Right clicking, selecting properties and editing the title is simplicity in itself.

I’m not sure about the updated icons in the new Firefox 2 Beta 2 – they don’t seem as polished as the beta 1 versions. I’m not the only one to think this it seems.

Technorati Tags: firefox beta 2, user interface, ui

According to Joystiq, the Xbox 360 and PS3 do not offer sufficient power for high quality Crysis action. Now, to my mind that’s just some sloppy engine optimisation. Both consoles are more powerful than an average home PC, so they are in effect saying that their game will only look good on a top end PC with the latest graphic card.

Who is this statement supposed to appeal to anyway? Is it to make PC gamers feel superior to consoles gamers, only for them to realise their PC won’t play it either, unless they shell out another £300 in upgrades?

Technorati Tags: crysis, pc gaming, pr hype