Since the last post some things have happend for me with reguards to gaming. With the good Mr foott aquiring himself quite a decent laptop, we have taken to playing more laptop LAN sessions. after an initial spell of returning to Diablo 2, what a game, we have stretched our wings and ventured into guild wars. I had started playing about a year ago and so i was happy to pik it up again. Mike was in a similar boat and with footsie getting quite hooked and darran following shortly after we have started our own guild. We are the Knights of the Gline and we welcome all those who will help us get a hall. I have also started with Rainbow Six 2. By started i mean i began the single player story last night, and by single player i mean playing with Footsie over live. Still its all good. Rainbow Six is actually more than good its great or excellent whichever you will. I love a game that encourages good Co Op play and this game certinaly does that. Given your play styles complement eachother then its the best feeling ever… in games… so far… i think. The game is pretty mush a refinment on the first, a few added controls, crisper graphics and i think slightly smarter AI but i am not too sure on that one. I need to play a little more to get a better idea.

That may have to wait however because the last of the assignments for college are due in the next month, starting with a quick CG animation which, may i say, is goming on swimmingly. And so with that i am off to continue my work. In the meantime i have gotten help with the addition of content. Ian will be the second person to write for the site, I think he is starting with a review of 10,000BC or something.

Bar that everything else is college work, including a very broken version of Blackjack. It seems the swf file works on a PC but doesnt work online so i cant put up an example. Sorry. I’ll throw it up anyway of course so look at the flash page for it.

And that about wraps it up. I might try and write epoch myself in my free time so if anyone is excited then expect a release date sometime next year and dont expect anything that would warrant that much development time.

Over the weekend i managed to aquire Call of Duty 4. It is quite the game and Mr Foott you were not lying. Our few hours playing on Saturday were most enjoyable and once i have the time free again it off to finish it on veteran, It is tough though. Those foolish americans an their large scale gunfights in side alleys, i never know where the bullets are coming from. But thats enough of that. Unfortunately it doesnt have a cool screenshot feature so no Album of ingame shots. There is however a level editor so i might try my hand at that sometime, see what people think, if anyone wants to try a map or two.

Now onto the big news. We submitted our design for the imagine cup. It was tight, everyone is pretty busy but we got it in. HUH HUH. The name is somthing of a problem. I know we had one but i couldnt remember it so on a last minute execuitive decision I changed it to Epoch. It means a period of time determined by a distinguishing characteristic. This is also subject to change but it is easier to remember and i just noticed it appeared in a recent XKCD comic strip which is always a good thing. Sorry Mike. So for those who dont know here is a quick synopsis of the story.

A civilisation has over populated and destroyed their planet but at the last minute finds a new home, but this time they don’t want to repeat their mistakes. Their survival depends on one man and the hope he can build a new home to allow their species to live on. The story evolves around a character named Vir, his civilisation’s last hope. An accident occurs while on route to the new planet. His ship crashes and he remains in stasis for an undetermined amount of time. Unknown to him, his civilisation has already been destroyed. The user controls this character in a forced perspective view in the main window which will scroll as the user moves Vir giving them as sense of exploring the new land. While they move around the Island they discover the resources. Once the resources are discovered they have the option to activate the mini-game allowing them to collect resources or simply continue to explore the island. The game focuses on creating a sustainable environment, using current and future technologies. The user collects resources and manages the levels of the cloned population in order to determine if the planet is sustainable or not. The user starts the game on a main island which has a source of all the resources. As the game advances the user moves off the Main Island to find new Islands, each rich in one of the four resources Discovery of each island is initially made by boat journey, activated at a harbour which will appear on the first Island after the completion of first four resource levels. A corresponding harbour will appear on each subsequent island. Once the game for an Island has been completed a bridge will connect it to the Main Island. The cloned population will use these bridges to develop their civilisation. The user plays different mini-games to collect the resources and depending on how well the user does this will benefit/damage the environment.

And so there you go. I will now be posting screens and othere tid bits of information about the game as we go. I think the concept is good, just got to get the finesse on it now. Bring on the second round

Of course the reason I missed that class is because we were working on a part of our imagine cup game. It seems this may just be ok afterall. I will expand on these details once we have it submitted for round one. The suspence must be killing you

During my rushing around I have heard that the Swatch Internet time, the Beat, is trying to have a buit of resurgance. I think this deserves my somewhat limited support so i will do what i can to promote it. Expect the Swatch Time badge on the sidebars in the future. so maybe even by the time you read this. Try refreshing the Page, go on. Darran has also notified me of a feature of Php. it actually gives the time in beats so i will have my posting times displayed in beats too. How exciting is that?!?!?

Right thats about it, now to go and come through on all my promises.

For the imagine Cup we have decided on a mentor finally, or to be more precise we will decide on a mentor tomorrow morning/lunch time depending on what you think 11 o’ clock is. We shall also dole out the tasks for christmas so not being there would be a bad plan (mu ha ha ha ).

The real photos are of Orlas graduation, all 2 of them, it wasnt a great night for photos. It was cold and wet and there were wolves after me. So they will be in the photo album under Graduations ( Ithink thats is the folder, i’m too lazy to go check right now).

Now for the wonderful news. I am on my christmas break which really means i dont have to think about college much for a few weeks so i can concentrate on the Imagine Cup. Expect a demo some time in late January/ Early February in other words after the submission Date.

The Halo pictures are now both in flickr which you can get to through the widget on the right and in my own hosted web album, its less fancy but entirly run through Php. Feel free to have a little explore there are plenty of photos up there already to pass the hours or minutes whichever it may be. I am going to get the old features section transfered over next. shouldn’t take long i dont think but i would like to get the map feature back, it worked pretty well and it was fun to see where the hits i was getting were coming from. Once it is up please leave a pin and even a message. They are good fun to read when i have hit a mental block in college, much like now.

UPDATE: I looked at the features section and all that was there was the map so i have put it on its own, have a look in the Visitor Map link on the left there. Of course seeing as how i promised something from the old site i have put up the old front page, formatted to the new style of course but all the content is there if there was something you were looking for

Today Mike has finished the first draft for the Imagine cup relationships and its looking good. I’m really glad to have him and his mathetematical mind drawing up the effects of the various gamplay elements. Hopefully this will make the coding of our game logic significantly easier. I also got an email from Liam in microsoft about finding us a mentor so that may be sorted pretty soon. Or if someone who is frequenting this site would like to volunteer and feel they have the experience you know how to contact me, if you dont just send a mail to conor@conordjpc.com and tell me what you can do for us. You will have to be free in May and June and ready for a quick trip to Paris. Xna experience is also a requirement.

Finally, I have just had the Galant checked and the front left ball joint is, for want of a nicer word, knackered. does anyone have a spare? For little old me? For christmas? or even my birthday? its worth a shot no matter how long it is. huh huh huh. Ok thats about it. I’m getting all ready for christmas and the college work that will bring but i will continue to work here, its great for when i cant concentrate.

In other news, I have gotten Mass  Effect for the 360 and highly reccomend it to anybody who actually reads this thing. Its always fun to wander the galaxy, pitty its distracting me from everything else. With even more gaming stuff i finally got back to a bit of Halo 3 this week. Taidy and Simon helped and we managed to not get completly destroyed as we usually do. I’m going to put a section in the photo area of screen shots for our games, expect that to pop up over the weekend.

For the imagine cup, we have just left our latest meeting and  now we have to get cracking on familiarising ourselves with the Xna language and syntax. I have gotten the little Conordjpc.Com man to walk around the screen thanks to a few Tutorials. And thats about it, now back to class.