Computers

I recently a recorded a bunch of videos of the game Overcooked on Xbox One.

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Your goal is to assemble meals out of various ingredients, cook them, and serve them. Over time the meals get a bit more complicated and the levels get a lot more complicated. It is strongly designed to be played cooperatively with up to four people, and even supports two players on a single controller.

My only complaint would be the difficulty is based too much on complicated level design (and jumps up a bit too quickly). Some times the controls are not exactly tight and you can end up selecting the wrong thing - having levels with moving targets or slippery floors for instance just accentuates an otherwise minor problem. I would have preferred more meal variations (that are also more complicated) on simpler levels.

But despite all that it’s a fun party game that almost anyone can play. And of course it is made in Unity.

One final note. The first video in the playlist above was generated by Google Photos. It turned out well, except for its automatic cropping.

TLDR: Check multiple references to the same nuget package are all on the same version if you use the Mono linker.

Since my ability to post regularly on things I’m interested in is not great, I figured I could at least post stuff that might be useful.

I recently upgraded a Xamarin iOS app from the “classic” (32bit only) API to the Unified API. After doing so I got the error message:

System.ExecutionEngineException: Attempting to JIT compile method
```.

This is caused by the Xamarin (Mono) linker removing code that is only referenced dynamically. The usual solution is to let the compiler know somehow that you are using the code (using a Preserve attribute if it's your own code or something like MvvmCross's [LinkerPleaseInclude.cs](https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/blob/f72a92e8a81b9179d1f75d6214eee8c9ca176221/nuspec/TouchContent/LinkerPleaseInclude.cs.pp) otherwisr).

In my case, this did not fix the problem. It turns out the Unified API upgrade was a red herring. I had also updated a few nuget packages at the same time. One of them was used in several projects, but I'd missed updating one of them (so I had Project A using v1 of a package and Project B using v2 of a package). This meant my efforts to stop the linker from removing some stuff only worked on one version of the package.

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Remember to visit Gravitas on Google+.

It’s been a while since I reported that Gravitas was in final play testing. To be honest the process didn’t actually take that long, I just became busy in the meantime. But I have now finally submitted Gravitas for peer review and it’s currently marked as “60% complete”. Based on what I’ve seen of other games as a reviewer that means it should be a few days before it’s eligible for release.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been some work not related to the release. Firstly, the game now runs successfully on a Mac thanks to MonoGame which I hope will lead to a Mac App Store release. Secondly, I’ve been cleaning up the code (mainly separating out anything that isn’t Gravitas specific in preparation for beginning my second game, which for the moment I’m going to keep quite about.

To keep up to date on that and any other Gravitas news, visit Gravitas on Google+.

CCP have just announced DUST514 will be exclusive to the Playstation 3. Which is a shame (check out the EVE Online forums for some stronger opinions). Unfortunately it makes sense for a few reasons (well making it exclusive to one console makes sense - whether the 360 or the PS3 was the better choice is more debatable).

Developing for a single console is quicker and easier - especially important for a game that will probably have more updates than the average game.

There are suggestions that one or both of Sony and Microsoft aren’t happy about cross-platform multiplayer games.

Since the idea of the game (a console FPS interacting with a PC MMO) is quite revolutionary they could get a lot of support (both financially and in terms of marketing and other benefits) from the console manufacturer, but only if it’s exclusive.

That being said, it may not be the end for the Xbox 360 and DUST.  Sony have suffered recently and definitely have lower consumer confidence (will players have to give Sony any personal information to play DUST?) and this decision will have been made long before Sony’s hacking problems. If sales are lower than CCP hope they may rethink the plan. And remember, “exclusive” in the games industry can be a vague and rarely lasts for ever.

The game is scheduled for a Spring release so at least 360-only owners have a while to decided if they want to get a PS3 just for this game…

The biggest news in the EVE Online World recently (and in my opinion, some of the biggest news in gaming) is the announcement of DUST 514, a console FPS/RTS being developed by CCP and based in the EVE Universe.

On the surface DUST looks a lot like a slightly grittier Halo 3. Basically a futuristic first person shooter with a strong focus on vehicles. The big point comes from it’s interaction with the EVE Online universe. The combat in DUST will take place on the surface of planets in EVE. As a consequence the result of battles will effect EVE. How big this effect will be (and in exact nature is not yet known). What we do know is that it will tie in with the upcoming changes to sovereignty in the Dominion expansion to EVE.

A few people have responded with horror to this,  worried that control of their systems will now be at the mercy of some crazy twelve year old console dude. Although it’s probably wise to have a little concern, DUST has been in development for two years and EVE Online is CCPs flagship product - I don’t think they began this endeavour without some serious thought.

Personally I think it’s an amazing idea, creating a universe that can entertain two rather disparate audiences (PC MMO players and console FPS players) at the same time and hopefully make them both more fun because of it.

More info should be forthcoming at EVE Fest, on October 1st.

Google released a new plugin for Internet Explorer today called Google Chrome Frame. It’s a simple but clever idea to bring the latest HTML 5 technologies to IE by simply embedding the Webkit based Google Chrome rendering engine.

It’s opt-in per site. You have to add a specific meta tag to your pages to make it take advantage of the plugin if it’s installed. There is also a Javascript way of detecting if the plugin is installed and inviting users to install it if isn’t.

They aren’t just doing this to help IE users out however. Google Wave makes use of HTML 5 stuff that doesn’t work in IE and the beta will go public on September 30th. And however good Google Wave may be, if IE users can’t use it, it won’t be a success…

I found a new website through the MythTV mailing list a few days called The Movie DB. It’s essentially aiming to be an open version of IMDB.

Many projects (such as MythTV and XBMC) have depended IMDB for a long time to provide metadata. Unfortunately this has usually been against the rules and was often difficult any since it relies on rather fragile screen scraping.

So in steps the Movie DB. From what I can tell from reading around the forums and stuff (and apologies if any of this isn’t accurate) it was started by the guy who wrote Meligrove, a database of fan made movie posters to replace a similar effort called Movie XML. The content is a little limited right now (about 8000 movies apparently) but the database from Movie XML is soon to be imported adding another 150,000.

Of course the important point is that the Movie DB is an open database - all the entries are editable wiki style. It also has high level support for TV series (with seasons and episodes etc) as well and a not-quite-ready public API.

I’ve keeping my eye on a project called Elisa a lot recently. It’s basically another attempt to produce a cross platform* media centre solution. At the moment its features are fairly limited, it’s essentially just some nice media playing software. It does have plugins to handle Youtube and Flickr though with lots of other stuff planned.

The main reason I’m interested in it though is that it feels likes it’s constantly making progress (and they make the progress very visible). They have weekly releases and every one actually has some cool new feature. It’s also written in Python which I think lowers the bar a little for community contributions (as opposed to C++/Qt required for MythTV).

For it to replace MythTV for me the obvious missing feature is, well, TV. Reading the forum suggests it’s quite low on the priority list for the moment (since it obviously requires a lot of work and other features are less likely to be released in the meantime just because the developers are busy). But, as I said at the beginning, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

* Not so long ago it only worked on Linux, now it supports Windows. It technically supports MacOS with some messing around but they’re aiming for proper support soon.

Well this came way out of left field for me, but after reading their thoughts and plans on the matter makes a lot of sense: Google have released a browser, called Chrome. Main highlights: based on Webkit and using a spanking new Javascript engine called V8.

I’m using it right now to type this and everything seems in order. It feels faster than Firefox 3, the interface is nice and clean and I’m generally revelling in the nice newness of it all. Interestingly it seems to have a spellchecker built-in that doesn’t recognise the word “Google”…

Anyway, anything I might say about the browser this early will end up repeating most of their hype, and that is done much better by this comic strip they released.

PS. Currently the beta version is Windows only with Linux and Mac versions to follow..