Lego Star Wars II
They’ve announced that Lego Star Wars II is to be released!
It will feature all the greatness of the first, along with mounts and vehicles for the player to use. Also, it’ll be set in Epsiodes 4 to 6, instead of 1 to 3 with the original.
Looking at the recently released screenshots has got me wanting to play the original through again…
More info here.
Wipers
I spent this weekend at my parent’s, back down in Windsor. Friday evening we ‘road tripped’ it down there in 3 hours or so, me in my blue Punto, Simon (my sister’s other half) in his yellow Punto.
That’s not what I’m writing about though… on the way back, this afternoon at about 4pm, I encountered a lot of rain, so much in fact that my driver’s side windscreen wiper ripped loose and basically buggered up. Hazards on, I pulled into the hard shoulder and after 10 minutes of fiddling about in the pouring rain, I switched the broken blade with the passenger’s side wiper blade.
And thus, I was able to continue onwards to Lincoln once again.
The good news is that I finally confirmed my car’s top speed - it’s rated at 96mph in Top Gear magazine and in the handbook. It reached 96mph quite happily, but wouldn’t go any further as the gear ratio seems to limit it (there was still travel on the throttle). It cruised along the A1 nicely at 90mph though for a good 30 minutes.
Speeding is a crime. Crime doesn’t pay.
Quad core+
Intel have announced a new chip that will blow most others out of the water… Quad core. To be released in about a years time.
It seems that predictions are coming true - PCs are going the way of the consoles, fitting as many cores onto a chip as possible - with both the XBOX 360 and PS3 using multi-core chips.
The catalogue of compatible games is increasing too, which can only be a good thing.
However, I’m not going to end up buying one myself - for a start, £800 (most likely .rrp) is enough to spend a fortnight in the Caribbean… not the sort of money you want to splash out on a cpu.
AMD apparently have plans to release 8 core chips for 2008, most likely beating Intel once again. The question is - are they going sideways now and not up? Processor speeds are levelling out, with no REAL improvement…
More information here.
University and Games
I’ll give you a few quotes to begin with:
“The motion capture studio at the University…”
Hah, we didn’t even have enough Studio Max licenses to fulfill the amount of students.
“…the University of Bradford has PS2 development kits and a license for RenderWare…”
We were supposedley getting these - they’ll probably acquire them once the PS3 has been released.
“We produced the prototype on a limited budget of £200 Sterling. Most of the budget was blown on the six copies of Unreal Tournament and some copies of WOTgreal, an Unreal editor.”
We were pretty much forced to use pirated software for many assignments - due to the lack of available workstations and licenses.
“In the final year, artists and programmers get to work on a team project to create a polished game as well as individually complete assignments for several other advanced modules whilst working on a self managed final project and dissertation.”
That’s what all of us would have loved to do - instead we got together and programmed a text editor.
…taken from here and here (the latter of which is well worth reading if you believe a Games degree is a mickey mouse course).
Our University, who shall remain nameless (unless someone wishes to comment on the name), had nowhere near the resources these guys did. And the course layout was really bad, we were pretty much stuck with the units presented to us, whereas the newer students had the option to choose their units, specialising in the final year.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain, seeing as I got a degree out of it. But when you say to someone you’ve majored in Games Computing, they either laugh or stare blankly at you… so I simply say I graduated in Computing.
What are your thoughts on the University of L******?
WordPress 2.0.1
I know, I know - WordPress 2.0 has been out for a good month or so, and the latest update 2.0.1 has been released… but I don’t think I’ll be migrating Lazlow’s Blog (well, my blog) to the updated system.
I’m not going to be stuck in the dark ages if I don’t upgrade - but for once I’m going to stick to the philosophy:
If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
This blog functions fine, just how I intend it to. I’ve spent hours hacking away at the many files within the blog and I don’t want to undo all the hard work. I have, however, installed WordPress 2.0.1 somewhere else on the slickhouse.com server for my next project. It’s this initial testing of the update that has put me off upgrading my blog. For a start, I don’t like the new format for posting. It also feels a lot slower in comparison.
I wont give out any more details yet on what this new project is, as in fact it’s more of a revival of a past project that never got going properly. I will of course post here as and when I have news on it though…