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

It seems that every week there are dozens of new portfolio sites popping up – sometimes they look good, and sometimes they look bad. Storage space is often hard to find, some free hosts make it almost impossible to directly link to your images, and some people are still manually editing and upload HTML.

Why not use the easy route? Blog it. These days image sharing sites and blogging sites are closely linked, so we can use them to store and display all the content.

I’m going to show you how to quickly create a portfolio site that will look good, be simple to update, and display your art easily. It will use default settings for most things, but I’ll point you in the right direction for customisation. I said quickly, and I mean it – with a high speed internet connection you should have everything running in about 15 minutes.

The Blog

Firstly, we need a blog to hold all the content. There are dozens to choose from, but you’ll want one that lets you integrate other sites into it using an API. I’ll use WordPress for this example, but you could equally use LiveJournal, Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad or whatever.

So I went to http://www.wordpress.com and signed up for a blog. This took about 30 seconds – they emailed my password to me, and http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/ was up and running. Using WordPress is a breeze – just click ‘Add new post’ and type away.

So, in 2 minutes I had a site with my own content on it – but it used the default WordPress template so it looked like every other WordPress site out there. My rsart.co.uk site is a WordPress based site, but I used my own hosting and installed their blogging software myself. I really went to work on rsart, editing the stylesheet and layout templates to get something that worked for me, and you can do this on a WordPress.com hosted account just as easily – but you have to pay for the privilege (about $15). But since this article is all about speed, for now we are simply going to pick a template design.

If you go to the Presentation tab on the WordPress dashboard you can edit the CSS, or you can simply pick from one of the 40 or so themes that are just sitting there (with nice big preview images). I went for Benevolence – it was the first one on the list that I liked.

The images

Now we need an image host – and we might as well use Flickr as it has excellent ties with WordPress. I already have a Flickr account, so I’ll not set up a new one, but I assure that it is simplicity itself. When you sign up you get a coded id, like n001828-a, but you can change this to something much easier to remember. I choose rickstirling for mine, and you can view my images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickstirling/

Once you account is setup you can upload you images. Flickr has a web based uploader, but you can also upload by email or by using a variety of applications – you can also send photos directly from your camera phone. I have a plugin for iPhoto that lets me upload directly to Flickr. Since I have a lot of images online, I’ll not upload a new one and instead I’ll use an existing image for my blog.

We need to configure Flickr to know where our blog is – fortunately this is easy. By going to http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne you can add a blog to your Flickr profile. Choose the blog type (in this case it’s WordPress), Then you fill in the API address – Flickr tells you what it is, in my case it will be http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php and then I give my blog login details. Press next and Flickr will try to verify this – 15 seconds later I’m good to go.

The setup is complete for the blog and image hosting.

Blogging the images

Now the final stage – getting an image onto your blog. This is the easiest part – simply upload your images to Flickr, navigate to the image that you want, and click the ‘Blog This’ button. This brings up a text editor, where you can give the image a different title and write a blog post about it. Press Post, and a few seconds later it’s done! Flickr has posted a blog post onto your site with the image.

You can see the images I posted from Flickr on my test WordPress.com site http://rickstirling.wordpress.com/

Taking it further

This short article was just a quick run through, showing you how to build an image blog in minutes. Of course you’ll want to take this further, so I’ll leave you with some links.

• The latest version of WordPress.com allows you embed video from Google Video and You Tube – perfect for showing off your animation.
• Flickr has a section dedicated to getting the most out out Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne
• Flickr also provide several methods of uploading you images – http://www.flickr.com/tools/
• WordPress can be installed on your own site, give you much greater flexibility – http://wordpress.org/
• WordPress blogs can be edited off line using several blog editors – Ecto and Windows Live Writer are just 2

Other Portfolio Thoughts

• Go read Jon Jones article, Your Portfolio Repels Jobs

Technorati Tags: Art, blog tool, ecto, flickr, photograph, portfolio, Web Development, windows live writer, wordpress