A while ago I decided to replace my aging DS Phat with a nice shiny new DSi, since I’d never bothered with the DS Lite because it wasn’t enough of an upgrade and my old DS worked fine.
For those of you who own a DS Lite and didn’t think the DSi was worth upgrading to I present you with the DSi’s first Killer App: Flipnote Studio.
Flipnote Studio allows you to make flip book animations on your DSi, using the stylus, microphone and even the camera (indirectly, you have to take the photos in the photo app and import them into Flipnote Studio).
Here’s the second animation I created (the first was more a test made during the tutorial and as such wasn’t really publishable)>
It’s pretty simple really just a boat running over a big wave, it took me about 20 minutes to get the whole thing done.
The next one is slightly more ambitious, take a look and see.
I did this during my lunch break at work, and added some finishing touches when I got home, I forgot to add dust coming up from the tyres as the car rolls along, but that’s simple enough to go back and add. This animation is 40 frames long and probably represents about 1hours worth of work.
The ability to upload is available directly from the DSi, and even if you’re not artistic you can download and view animations directly on the DSi, you can even edit and modify and re-upload your own version to the site (it even remembers the original creator, so you can’t pass it off as all your own work).
Even if you can’t connect from the DSi you can use the software to create animated GIFs of your animations (without sound) and save them to SD card where you can post them anywhere with your PC.
So if you ever needed a reason to get a DSi and like the idea of creating your own animations then Flipnote Studio is the coolest little application I’ve used in a long time.
There’s lots of clamour on the Internet right now about the PS3 and it’s dismal sales, lots of people are saying that Sony needs a price cut, others are saying that Sony can’t afford to do that right now. So who is correct and what can Sony do?
Another multi-part post, I know but this is going to take a while, and it’s hard to know where to start, I think we shouild start with the root of the problem, Publishers.
Well after a long delay (lack of internet connection, busy at work, plain forgetfulness) I bring you final part, this part is pretty subjective, seeing as I don’t actually have a crystal ball and cannot predict the future, however I can see trends and extrapolate, and the extra couple of months have been going pretty much as I expected.
My prediction of the winner is: Nintendo Wii
When I say winner I mean winner, we’re talking Sony PS2, Nintendo DS levels of success, not as some analysts predict a fairly even split with the Wii just in front, we’re talking donination (Nintendomination even), and how do I reach this conclusion, I’ll reveal that after the break.
Okay, we’ve covered the Wii and Xbox 360, now it’s the PS3’s turn, while I have personal experience with the Xbox, the PS3 isn’t even available here yet, so I cannot gauge how it’s doing, but just looking around local stores and online game stores I notice that the PS3 is still available for pre-order after 2 weeks, either Sony has got a serious amount of consoles available, or pre-orders are slower than Sony anticipated, but enough of the anecdotal stuff, onto the serious part.
Okay, the next part, while I’m at it, last time we looked at the Wii, giving three reason why it might win or lose, now we’ll move onto the Xbox 360, it’s a different beast to the Wii, more expensive, way more powerful, and conciderable larger.
I’ve thought long and hard about this and have decided to write my ideas down in a series of blog entries, the first 3 parts are going to give the reasons why and why not for each console (Wii,Xbox 360 and PS3), three for each for each console, I may have my own personal bias, but I’m trying to be fair here so each console will get 3 points in each and I wont hold back where I think something was wrong (as you’ll see in this one).
Note: Out of the three consoles presented here I only own 1 of them, the Xbox 360, one isn’t out in my country yet (PS3) and I haven’t got the cash or even found a Wii. I do however own all 4 of last generations (I’m counting the Dreamcast in the last Gen, though it was too early to really be concidered) and envision owning all 3 of this generations consoles.
It seems that all that effort and lost days that stopped me from entering the Dream, Build, Play warmup contest have actually paid off, since I got the job I was going for the interview for. I start work on the 12th of March, which means that between now and then I have to pack up everything in my little flat and prepare to move back down to England. Oh well, since part two hasn’t been announced yet, and since I don’t know if I’d be eligable to enter now (back working in the Games Industry again) it’s probably best if I concentrate on my impending move.
Well I was planning on entering the warmup for the Dream Build Play Contest that Microsoft are currently running, however real-world events (job interviews) mean that I wont have time to build the game I planned, and I dont feel like coming up with a simpler idea now, I lost two days last week, and will lose 4 this week, that’s six days from a two week schedule, so no one will get to see Spacewars Adventure, oh well, we’ll see what happens when the main contest goes live.
I’ve converted my Cutscene Camera from HDL into a small library with a simple API which is designed to allow anyone to create smooth camera moves with the minimum of effort, it even supports changing the field of view. The API makes it easy to incorporate the camera straight into your code by creating View, Projection or View/Projection matrices for you based on the the current time value, and if you need more control you can extract the current camera position, look at target and Field Of View directly and build your own matrices.
You can download the library which contains instructions on how to use it, plus a small demo application here.