[PROTOTYPE] launched earlier this year on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, developed by Radical Entertainment. Released during June 2009, it was part of several largely hyped, third person, sandbox games launching this year, including inFAMOUS and Red Faction: Guerrilla. I’m late on my review, I know.
This genre has really been defined and refined by the Grand Theft Auto series – the only true standout in the genre thus far, so there are some unavoidable comparisons.
Story
The story goes something like: You’re Alex Mercer, you wake up in a morgue remembering little other than your name, and discover you’ve got two problems: one, you’ve got super powers, two you’re being hunted because you’re infected/have super powers. These super powers give you the ability to shape shift your body into various weapons and armour, as well as take the form and memories of other people by consuming them.
Given the game is of the sandbox genre, it would be fair to expect [PROTOTYPE] to suffers the same as all sandbox games when it comes to pacing. It’s hard/impossible for the developers to set the pace of the game and story when the player is the one who is ultimately calling the shots. It also makes it harder to tell the story as its being interrupted by the pesky player going off and doing side missions. Unfortunately, Radical took it upon themselves to make it even more difficult on themselves by not revealing all of the story unless you “consume” certain VIPs – who are weak and fleshy and will die if you run into them a little too fast.
Gameplay
Like the majority of the Grand Theft Auto series, [PROTOTYPE] is 3D, but unlike GTA, that really does mean every possible direction and dimension – half the game is played on the rooftops or climbing skyscrapers. While it looks and feels awesome to be gliding or scaling huge buildings at first, it becomes tedious as its a rather slow way to move around a rather large city. Red Faction: Guerrilla suffered from the same problem where transport (cars) was the weakest element in the game.
For the most part the difficulty curve is… absolutely broken. The first level is “somewhat towards the end” of the game, a psuedo-tutorial if you like, where you have all your powers/abilities at your disposal. When the level ends, you go back to retell your story to a shadowy figure, losing all your abilities. Assassins Creed did the same thing, and frankly I find it more frustrating than anything. However, this isn’t what breaks the difficulty curve. The game flipflops between being stupidly easy, and setting you up against boss fights or the like which require 10-30minutes because the opponent has so much health/armour that your weaponry – which carves through tanks – is ineffective. Then throw in a section where you lose your abilities? Yeah. Great.
The control system wasn’t exactly intuitive either, which didn’t help the combat system. The combat system lets you activate a variety of powers, the more powerful “moves” resembling more of a Street Fighter/Tekken combo system which (at least on PC) lead me to do one thing – spam light attacks. It was far too easier just to use the “Blade” and just a general “attack” rather than the “twenty five button combo that cuts everything down, but takes three minutes”.
Overall
There are some genuine highlights in this game that you are very unlikely to see in other games, such as the ability to kick a chopper and make it explode. The novelty of these sort of features runs out quickly as the game shows its a little too repetitive.
Overall the game isn’t bad, I’m happy saying that it is good – but it is not great. The poor story, repetitive gameplay and dull graphics (again, they weren’t poor, but they were certainly not great, and the repetitive scenery did not help) are the main detractors, while sense of freedom, encouragement to destroy everything, and some unique gameplay movements are the attractors.
2.5/5
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In .NET 3.5 SP1, WPF saw some fantastic performance increases including one of my favourites – the virtualising stackpanel (VSP). VSP’s meant that the items in a listbox/etc that aren’t on screen aren’t rendered – they’re virtualised. This provides memory and CPU performance increases.
VSP has two modes, Standard and Recycling, where the latter reuses the UI containers when it can, just changing the content, doing this saves even more memory.
And here is what happens when I enable VirtualisingStackPanel on a ListView in MahTweets.
That looks a little more than 140 characters per tweet – it starts combining the text in items. Fantastic.
If I use an ItemsControl (which Listbox/View are derived from), everything works fine – but ItemsControl has its own problems.
Note, this happens with any textbox/RTB I’ve tried in a ListBox/View with Recycling enabled, not just with my fancy ItemTemplates.
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On the left is WPF, on the right is WinForms, both have this.Opacity = 0.5; as the only code behind the button.
The WinForms example, as you can see, is semi-transparent and would shown whatever is behind it (if there was something behind it)
The WPF example, however, just "dulls" the contents of the Window rather than making the whole thing semi-transparent. The way to do it is to set AllowTransparency="true". However, that means WindowStyle must be set to None, which means you lose the chrome (the ‘glass’ around it), the minimise, maximise and close button, so you have to create and control those, as well as manually resizing the Window and manually controlling moving the Window.
I tried P/Invoking the Win32 libraries to set opacity and they work perfectly… on WinForms. They fail miserably in WPF.
I’m happy to be corrected if anybody knows a solution.
Opacity earns this weeks WPFWTF award and leaves us scratching our heads with the slogan, WinForms: Back To The Future.
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This was originally posted on the Deakin Student Partners Blog
In the words of Hubert J. Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!" – Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 are all now on Dreamspark, free to students! Expression Studio 3 brings some awesome improvements to.. well.. every product in it – Blend 3 + SketchFlow, Web + Super Preview, Encoder now has screencasting.
Expression Studio 3 Highlights
- Expression Encoder 3
- Improved H.264
- VBR Smooth Streaming
- Source CODECs
- Audio Enhancements.
- Performance
- Live Encoding
- Screen Capture
- Improved profile pallete
- Silverlight 3 Media Players
- New player skins
- API Enhancements
- Win7 Integration
- SDK "in the box"
- Expression Blend 3
- SketchFlow – Sketch WPF/Silverlight interactive prototypes.
- Photoshop and Illustrator support
- Styling Controls: Creating templates from artwork
- Styling Controls: Creating TextBox Templates from Artwork
- States: Improved Support for VSM
- Interactivity: Behaviors
- Working with and Generating Data
- Expression Web 3
- Super Preview – view side by side comparisons of your website in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7/8 and more
- Publish with SFTP/FTPS
- Improved Photoshop PSD support – import just the layers you want!
- Silverlight support – uses Expression Encoder 3 to encode (nearly) any video you want to Silverlight and embed on your site!
- TFS SC support
- Deep Zoom Composer support
XNA Game Studio 3.1 Highlights 
- Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
- Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
- Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
- Full screen video playback
- Video playback to simple textures in game
- Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
- Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
- Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
- Play back multiple video streams at the same time
- Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
- Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add custom types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
- XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
- Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.
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I’ve got 15 copies of the Windows Mobile Developer Tools, which contains everything (minus Visual Studio) you need to get started on enter the Student APPrentice competition.
These DVDs include
- Windows Mobile 6 Standard and Professional SDK Refresh
- Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard and Professional Images
- Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard and Professional Developer Toolkit (which includes the 6.5 Images)
- Codemason’s Guild Live Meeting videos
It totals up to 1.76gb of SDK goodness, which can be a pain to download.
If you want one of these 15 DVDs, use the contact form on our about page to give me your name and postal address, and I’ll get these out as soon as possible! First come first served basis.
Oh nuts, you don’t have Visual Studio? As a student you can get it for free via MSDNAA from your University or from Dreamspark.
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If you’re interested in the APPrentice competition but have questions on the inner workings of the Windows Mobile Marketplace? Well, the Codemasons guild are holding a series of (free, I think) events on down the east coast of the country.
Next week we will be holding a series of events to help developers get their application development moving for Windows Mobile 6.5 and into Marketplace.
These Debug Days will be held from 4.30pm till 9pm on;
- Monday August 10th – Microsoft Brisbane, Level 9 Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane
- Tuesday August 11th – Microsoft Sydney, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde
- Wednesday August 12th – Microsoft Melbourne, Level 5, 4 Freshwater Place, Southbank
We will provide an update on Marketplace, the signup/registration process, and the guidelines.
The evening is then over to the developers – so what are the topics you want out MVPs to cover – let us know;
- post your comments to this post
- Tweet James McCutcheon or Nick Randolph on Twitter
We’ll update the topic lists here @ WMOZ, @ the Codemasons’ Guild, and James/Nick will Tweet as well.
Rego links coming soon – but slot some time in your diary.
PS – we’ll have some drinks & food on hand as well :-)
via WinMoOZ
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I’ve been very slack in posting this, sorry Karo!
Microsoft AU are running a competition for students to celebrate the upcoming launch of the Windows Mobile Marketplace.
Don’t worry, if you don’t have a Windows Mobile phone you can still create apps for it, thanks to the device emulators in Visual Studio. Remember students can get Visual Studio 2008 Professional for free directly from Microsoft at www.dreamspark.com
If you’ve never thought about developing for Windows Mobile, it just uses the .NET Compact Framework – so the chances are if you’ve used Visual Studio before, you can write a mobile app.
However, if you want to learn a bit more, there are some excellent videos up on MSDN entitled “How Do I? Videos For Devices”.
The competition closes AUGUST 17th! Details about the competition are below, or the full details can be found at the Codemasons Guild.
What’s up for grabs?
The two successful applicants will win:
- A full pass to attend Microsoft Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast, from September 8–11, 2009 (which includes a complimentary HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC, worth $990 (recommended retail price))
- A return adult economy airfare to the Gold Coast from your nearest capital city
- 3 nights accommodation at The Crown Plaza Gold Towers on the Gold Coast in a standard room
- A session with a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) mentor during Tech.Ed
- Tickets to Smackdown on September 11, 2009, where the best Windows Mobile app will be awarded to the overall winner!
Who can enter?
To be eligible to enter the APPrentice competition, you must be an Australian resident aged over 18 years or over, who is currently enrolled in a part time or full time undergraduate or postgraduate course at an Australian University or TAFE institution.
How do I enter?
Entry is via email only. To enter, provide the required information and attachments below and send to codemgld@microsoft.com before 11:59pm (AEDST) on August 17, 2009.
Your entry needs to include the following information:
- Full name, contact email address and a contact phone number
- Your Mobile application name
- The genre that your Mobile application fits into: Game/Entertainment/Utilities/Communications/Music & Video/Lifestyle/Finance/Business/Health, Sport or Fitness/Productivity/Travel/Education
- A 300 word or less description of the application you are developing. Your response should include the operation of the application, the type of device it would target, if it would be a free app or paid app, and why you think someone would want to buy and download your application.
Your entry must include the following attachments:
via Codemasons Guild (MSFT AU)
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While reviving MahTweets I ran into severe performance problems, which were incredibly difficult to track down as none of the profiling tools I tried could really pinpoint the issues. The two issues were, while there were tweets being displayed
- Typing into a textbox with TextWrapping enabled could cause up to 25% CPU usage on my quad core desktop machine (or ~60% CPU usage on my laptop) and,
- When the webcam was enabled (so I’d presume the InteropBitmap that was being used to display it), everything would still function except the UI would ‘lock up’ and not respond to mouse/keyboard controls, and consume similar levels of CPU cycles.
It turns out both performance issues were related and the key was the datatemplate I was using in the ItemsControl (or ListBox or ListView) to display the tweets. Inside the datatemplate, I used two custom controls which both made us of the Hyperlink inline element to act as.. well.. links to either other functions to launching browsers at particular urls (eg, going to the home page of whatever twitter client people were using).
If I turned off those two custom controls, performance was awesome (amazingly awesome with virtualisingstackpanel enabled). If I turned on those controls but commented out hyperlinks, it was just as awesome.
I found (actually, @shiftkey found it for me) an example of making the WinForms style LinkLabel by extending Label. While Labels can be inserted into inline containers (such as a RichTextBox, which is what one of my custom controls was based on) they’re not selectable. While you can select over them, it doesn’t select the content inside… what I mean is if you have "fee fi fo fum", with fi fo being the contents of a LinkLabel,
public class InlineLink : Underline
{
public Uri Url
{
get { return (Uri)GetValue(UrlProperty); }
set { SetValue(UrlProperty, value); }
}
public String Text
{
get { return (String)GetValue(TextProperty); }
set { SetValue(TextProperty, value); }
}
public static readonly DependencyProperty UrlProperty =
DependencyProperty.Register("Url", typeof(Uri), typeof(InlineLink),
new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(null, new PropertyChangedCallback(OnUrlChanged)));
public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty =
DependencyProperty.Register("Text", typeof(String), typeof(InlineLink),
new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(string.Empty, new PropertyChangedCallback(OnUrlChanged)));
private static void OnUrlChanged(DependencyObject obj, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args)
{
InlineLink il = (InlineLink)obj;
il.Inlines.Clear();
Run r = new Run(il.Text);
il.Inlines.Add(r);
il.Cursor = Cursors.Hand;
}
}
link.Click can be simulated by just using MouseLeftButtonDown (events didn’t seem to fire for ButtonUp’s)
inlinelink.MouseLeftButtonDown += new System.Windows.Input.MouseButtonEventHandler(conversationLink_Click);
Yes, I know that code is far from graceful, but it works well enough for a first stab at it. The funny thing is this extends Underline, which Underline extends Span – Hyperlink on the other hand.. well, this is the class signature public class Hyperlink : Span, ICommandSource, IUriContext
I wonder if it was something in ICommandSource, IUriContext, or within Hyperlink that was causing the problem?
My advice? Don’t use the Hyperlink control. Either roll your own "LinkLabel", or if you need an inline element that does linking use something like what I’ve got above.
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MahTweets is my twitter client of choice. Why? Well, I wrote it. Okay, that isn’t the only reason, it has some pretty awesome features distinguishing it from many Twitter clients.
Features
- Inline media viewing
View twitpic, flickr, direct images, and youtube (working on it, an IE8 update broke it) all inside MahTweets. Support will be expanded to support yfrog and any other services people request.
- Webcam support
Use your webcam to directly upload to twitpic (flickr, yfrog, and others coming later) or as your avatar on Twitter
- Conversation viewing
- Tracking
This was common in the "old days" of Twitter, but now it seems to be called saved/inline searches? Either way, if you’re particular interested in tweets on a particular subject, track keywords using twitter search.
- Filtering
No more "#followfriday" clogging up my Twitter stream
- Scalable UI
Because MahTweets is coded in WPF, I can scale everything (not just change font sizes) neatly at a click of a button.
- Short URL expansion
Tired of being Rick Rolled through tinyurl, is.gd, bit.ly (and many others)?
By auto-expanding the shortened url’s (using Long URL Please), you won’t be launched into sites you know are bad
Multi-account support & grouping Coming soon!
Tech Goodness (Requirements and other details)
Through Windows 7’s "XP Mode" I’ve tested Windows XP support, and even in the virtualised environment it was smooth – so smooth that it took me a good 10 minutes or so to notice I’d launched it in XP Mode instead of "natively"!1
Below is a screenshot of an earlier build, running XP Mode and Windows 7 "natively"1 the two running side by side.
It’s so weird to see the Luna theme in Windows 7
Big thanks to WillHughes, Shiftkey, CADBloke, Chickz0r, and digihal for help, support, code and/or encouragement on the MahTweets project
1 – by "natively" I mean running in a non-virtualised environment.
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This series of posts, Living the Microsoft Life, are designed to show off some of the cool stuff from Microsoft that you can use in day-to-day life free, so that you can live a “Microsoft Life”. This was originally posted (by me) over on the Deakin MSP blog.
The list was so large and wordy I needed to split it into two parts! Part 1 was all about free software, this part (part 2) is about the free services and learning from Microsoft. This list doesn’t include every single one of Microsoft’s free services, but it is a fairly substantial list.
Then there are the free services…
Windows Live branded services
- Windows Live Home
Windows Live Home is a portal for your Live services, and a social network of sorts. Perhaps ’social network aggregator’ would be more accurate, as you’re able to add your ‘Web Activities’ such as any RSS feed, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Daum, Flixtser, iLike, Pandora, Photobucket, StumbleUpon, TripIt, Wordpress and Yelp.
In turn you’ll be able to see a “stream of activities” (much like what Facebook or Twitter already do) for all your contacts as they add their “Web Activities”. This “What’s new with your network” stream also appears down the bottom of Windows Live Messenger.
- Windows Live Sync (formerly FolderShare)
Synchronise files between two or more computers (with Live Sync installed) over a network, or the internet easily. If you don’t want Live Mesh limitations (of 5gb) or don’t want to store it in the cloud, LiveSync could be for you.There are Windows and Mac OS X clients, and it integrates into Windows Live Photo Gallery to sync albums between computers.
- Windows Live SkyDrive
(formerly Windows Live Folders)
25gb online storage, each file gets a unique url which you can share with anybody, or if you prefer, have it secured and private.Photos uploaded with Skydrive can be turned into galleries at Live Home
- Windows Live Hotmail
5 GB of mail storage that grows when you need it. Email address can end with @hotmail.com (or localised versions such as @hotmail.co.uk, @hotmail.fr) or @live.com (again it can be localised to domains such as @live.ca, @live.co.uk, @live.fr or @live.com.au)POP3 access is slowly being turned on around the world, as of February (2009), United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherland had access to it.
Personally, I’m loving the new(ish) interface on Live Hotmail and prefer it over Gmail. That being said, for my uses I prefer the IMAP access which Gmail gives me, so I use that service.
- Windows Live Spaces
Live Spaces is a combination of blogging platform and social network. If you want to start blogging, and want a non-technical setup, and don’t have to worry aboutLive Spaces includes blogging, photos, lists, friends, and guestbook functionality.
If you do setup Live Spaces, don’t forget to use Windows Live Writer!
- Live Mesh
Live Mesh is currently in beta, but with clients on the Web, Windows, OS X and Windows Mobile, Live Mesh is the easiest way to sync files between multiple devices, and without having to interact with the syncing process at all.5gb online storage for free, that’s can be synced between all your machines and devices without you having to lift a finger? Doesn’t get much better than that.
- Windows Live Calendar
It’s a web-calendar – supports iCalendar, intergrates with Live Hotmail (and the desktop client, Windows Live Mail). Features daily, weekly, monthly, and agenda modes.It integrates with Windows Live Alerts too, allowing you to get calendar information (such as an upcoming event) pushed over email, SMS, or Live Messenger alerts.
- Windows Live Admin Center
Want to use Live Hotmail, but instead of a “@live.com” or “@hotmail.com”, you’d prefer your own custom domain? Live Admin Center lets you create up to 500 email addresses (more if you meet certain requirements), free, with all the benefits of Live Hotmail (ie, growing mailbox, integrated calendar) on whatever domain you have.Setting it up isn’t overly complex…if you know how to change DNS/MX records (one MX record, and one DNS setting is all you need to get going)
Other services
- PhotoSynth
PhotoSynth is a way to take together photos taken of a similar location (or object), then stitch them together in 3D, and navigate around.
It was also featured on an episode of CSI.
- Office Live Workspace EDIT:See the comments, Jeff from MSFT Office Live team points out
“… the web-app versions of Office have not been launched yet. ….you can save more files than just MSFT Office file formats- most file formats are accepted in your Workspace, except for file formats like .exe that can cause harm to your computer”
Office Live Workspace gives you 5gb online to store Office documents. There are plugins for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook to save/load directly from “the cloud” as well.
Office Live Workspace allows you to collaborate with others, see what they’re uploading, what they edited, etc. Or you can keep it all private.As part of Office Live Workspace, Office Web Applications are included, which are lightweight/cut down versions of Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Onenote.
(these screenshots are all “edit mode” screenshots, click for the larger screenshots)
- Worldwide Telescope
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.This is part software and part service (no way is the client going to come with all those star maps, it’d be huge!), but entirely free.
- Silverlight Streaming
If you have a large hi-def video you want to stream through Silverlight, chances are you’ll kill your web-hosts bandwidth allowance very quickly.The Silverlight Streaming service is in beta, but it gives you up to 10 GB of storage, and streaming is free up to 5 TB of aggregated bandwidth per user account per month.
…And then there is free learning!
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