We've been doing small business websites, which used to be bread and butter work, especially when we were sole traders. But recently we've been making the decision to throw back some of these jobs, and give more of an advice role in the customer producing their own websites.
More often than not, the customer doesn't appreciate the work involved in doing something like set up a simple website, with contacts page, and allowing to change content on a few pages. Perhaps adding a gallery for uploading previous work.
By the time we tie down branding and logo, ease of use, navigation, and guiding the users eyes around the pages. Then building the structure and the admin side CMS, and making it SEO friendly (W3 standards, and all the Google toys set up) your looking at minimum 3 days work so over a grand and creeping up to 6K.
The customers response might be:
"Ooooph I only want a 6 page website, I was thinking more along the lines of 3 or 400 sheets?"
So is the market coming to an end for this sized customer?
We used to always take work on, and thought as long as work was coming our way then we couldn't fail.
However, this end of the market, the small business that wants an online presence, or has had a simple electronic business card type website for years and wants a little more now, is turning into a non profit minimum wage job. If another design house does manage to sell the solution at a higher price then they take the profit and pass the technical stuff to us. Either way we get squeezed to produce the mechanics. Looking to the future, it becomes hard to see how the business is going to boom. The customers are seeing more and more automatic tools for creating templated sites, and wonder why a tailoring company charges so much. They are right to feel this too, the tools out there to get yourself a web presence or online shop are now vast, and it might be better for customers to take a little time and do it themselves, or employ a student at a cheaper rate to set up the CMS packages for them.
We are now actively turning them away and giving more of an advice service to get them to use tools such as Google Apps.
We did ask, should we be developing more of a generic CMS system ourselves that allows us to quickly knock out a website for someone, but over the last 10 years I have known at least 2 other businesses that have wanted this. The theory is back 15 years ago when I was doing my Computer Science Degree, the new buzzword was Object Oriented Programming. It was this great new thing utilising Borland C++, and was the wave of the future. It was going to allow us to create objects and eventually these objects can all be pulled off of the shelf and plugged into each other making systems development easier.
Well that never really went according to plan, the way the university envisaged it, although we do write code for reuse ability, chances are when we come to reuse it, there is some new way, or new technology we have to consider and so rewrite or even recreate the object.
But like I say other companies have tried and failed at CMS systems, and when I see the successful ones (Kentico, Sharepoint, or Commonspot) then to accommodate for all of the individual things a customer might want, these have turned into a programming language in their own right that could easily have a training course purely for themselves, so have moved away from the easy off the shelf packages they first tried to be.
So where is the money now at in IT?
We are skilled, I can get a computer to do anything, so if I try and leave the minimum wage market of programming websites for other Small Businesses, then where can I go to grab the big bucks?
Creating our own products of interest to a market and getting funding.
Recently I was on a stand at the Thames Gateway Forum (ExCel centre), and competing with Gordon Brown and Ken Livingston's speeches to get my presentation across. I got loads of interest. I used to attend early morning BMI meetings and have a coffee and see how many business cards I can pass out in an hour. I hear of stories in these circles of other people in my position who secured x.x million pounds from some organisation to build something that I can do for a quarter of the price (which I have already proved by taking the audio visual system from Portcullis house, and rewriting it for a fraction of the cost for the Houses of Parliament).
How does anybody else ramp up their business to keep getting those large clients?
I see two answers, either we have to bite the bullet and employ a salesman. I know, last time I said I didn't want to go down that route, but I am now starting to see they do have a value to a team, in that they get right to the person holding the purse strings, and evaluate how much they can charge usually quite successfully. Then we can target the bigger businesses that have money to spend. Secondly we produce a product ourselves and resell it. Now that is a hard one. We have a few ideas that I have mentioned in previous blogs like the Wiimote for PC applications, and more recently we chased the idea of a Virtual Reality cricket trainer, but after research saw that we were a couple of years too late with that idea. :)
I believe we are a lot more technical than just a company that bangs out standard website templates, and we now need to consciously move away from that reputation and plant ourselves firmly in the market that can engineer full systems. We have come close to some of these dream jobs, like once I almost got to travel to Spain to kit out a posh yacht with full on automation. Once again I am wondering if we might be losing out on this slice of the cake due to underpricing ourselves which in turn undersells our skills.
I am not a cold caller, so am at present trying a bit of networking on UK forums to see what might come of it, but if any of you successful entrepreneurs out there want to give me some advice then please leave a comment.
Anyway, rant / findings over for now.
Lets try a little marketing and see what I can drum up.
Cheers for reading,
Lindsay.
Showing posts with label PC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PC. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Thursday, 13 December 2007
New Virtual Reality Headset
Well I always swore by the Z800 headset back when I was thinking of writing software, tools and games for the Virtual Reality market.
However a new bad boy has just come on the scene. The VR920 from eDimensional.
Now I have always liked ED because they are reasonably priced for some pretty top end geeky gadgets. I have had the shutter glasses for years now, and although I have had to wear them upside down because I use a projector (Image coming from behind me rather than in front of me). It still made games absolutely awesome. Plus with me writing games for the Wiimote for the PC, it made it possible to have a 3D wall with wiimote inputs making for some pretty realistic emmersive environments on my PC. There were limitations however that you could only see it when looking forward. Well the Z800 for £500 fixed that, and now so does this little gadget for around £200.
It contains pretty much the same stuff as the Z800 (Head tracking, dual visual displays allowing 1024x768 displays and supporting NVidia 3D Stereo drivers) plus earphones.
I do believe on top of this however, this one has also got a microphone to allow talking out as well.
I havent used it yet myself but I do fear that it suffers from one limitation of the Z800, it is wired. I see in the contents that it describes a 6 foot USB connection for it.
Now I totally understand why you need this, mainly because the power to run the screens, headtracking, microphone, and the sound would be too much for a battery pack, and would make the head gear heavy. But I do fear that you can turn round maybe 3 times before needing to turn back again (not helpful for the obsessive compulsives amoung us).
But yeah you would eventually gorrot yoruself if you kept turning one way and didnt untwist yorself at some point.
However I am eagerly awaiting a few reviews of this hardware, because like I say the shutter glasses were awesome, and with this being half price of anything else on the market, it could be the next step that pushes the PC far beyond the reach of a console capability wise, and brings us all that one step closer to full emmersion Virtual Reality.
I will keep you posted on any more news of this here.
Cheers,
Lindsay.
However a new bad boy has just come on the scene. The VR920 from eDimensional.
Now I have always liked ED because they are reasonably priced for some pretty top end geeky gadgets. I have had the shutter glasses for years now, and although I have had to wear them upside down because I use a projector (Image coming from behind me rather than in front of me). It still made games absolutely awesome. Plus with me writing games for the Wiimote for the PC, it made it possible to have a 3D wall with wiimote inputs making for some pretty realistic emmersive environments on my PC. There were limitations however that you could only see it when looking forward. Well the Z800 for £500 fixed that, and now so does this little gadget for around £200.
It contains pretty much the same stuff as the Z800 (Head tracking, dual visual displays allowing 1024x768 displays and supporting NVidia 3D Stereo drivers) plus earphones.
I do believe on top of this however, this one has also got a microphone to allow talking out as well.
I havent used it yet myself but I do fear that it suffers from one limitation of the Z800, it is wired. I see in the contents that it describes a 6 foot USB connection for it.
Now I totally understand why you need this, mainly because the power to run the screens, headtracking, microphone, and the sound would be too much for a battery pack, and would make the head gear heavy. But I do fear that you can turn round maybe 3 times before needing to turn back again (not helpful for the obsessive compulsives amoung us).
But yeah you would eventually gorrot yoruself if you kept turning one way and didnt untwist yorself at some point.
However I am eagerly awaiting a few reviews of this hardware, because like I say the shutter glasses were awesome, and with this being half price of anything else on the market, it could be the next step that pushes the PC far beyond the reach of a console capability wise, and brings us all that one step closer to full emmersion Virtual Reality.
I will keep you posted on any more news of this here.
Cheers,
Lindsay.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Mobile working
Well I am seeing more and more now about how mobile devices are taking off and people are talking about how easy it is to work while on the move.
I have seen recent success stories, and other not so successfuly stories.
This is at the front of my mind at the moment because I have just finished writing a project for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 Devices.
I have always liked the Microsoft Compact Framework, right back from when I was working with Windows Mobile 2002, and leaps forward with some of the frameworks communications tools and GUI controls have made recent projects very impressive for the end users. The latest application I have written is to tie in with a Server application written by us so that it can go out in the field and gather data.
It connects to the network either by a Cradle to PC connection, or a CF card with a SIM card connected to a networks GPRS, or with WiFi hotspots.
Thinking about 2 of these 3 ways of connecting (GPRS and WiFi) I thought I would write a little something down about my experiences with working mobile a couple of years back and what are the differences now.
2 years ago I went travelling with my girlfriend. We ripped the seats out of a Landrover 110 and fitted a double bed, fridge, power points and an auxhilliary battery, so I essentially had a mobile home / office that could off road to some beautiful spots for a few days at a time.
Firstly we took it round the UK for a couple of months because there is always loads on your doorstep that you never appreciate, and back then people were getting into WiFi. A lot of houses had never even heard of encryption and WEP and WPA and it was quite easy to pull up on a roadside, link into a network and send work in and get the next assignment. Hotspots were a little more expensive in that I remember up in Glasgow I wanted to link into the BT hotspot at McDonalds. It was 10 pounds for 24 hours access which wasnt too bad, but when you moved around it was quite difficult to find parking within range of these spots. More often than not I was having to sit in cafes and public places and work which wasnt the plan, I wanted to be sitting on a beach working. I can remember one time up in the Highlands I had no WiFi hotspots nearby and had to rely on my GPRS to work with. Back then it cost £1 per MegaByte. I was working on a flash project which was a 7MB file, so cost £7 to download it, £7 to upload the new one, and I invariably then got comments from the customer to say "Oooh can you just tweak this or change this text". Simple changes, but always cost me another £7 to get the update to them. So back then GPRS was very expensive, and WiFi was too few and far between to be able to rely on it and keep customers happy that they can always get hold of you and get files to and from you.
NOW however I still have my Landy kitted out, and were thinking of heading off again. Only 4 weeks this time, but it is a little too long to leave work totally, so I will be expecting to work on the road again.
With setting up GPRS for my latest project I saw that the deals now are £1 per day (15 MB maximum content) which is fantastic because you can get GPRS coverage from the beach. I have also signed up for a new deal with BT where I allow part of my BT broadband to be used by anyone (public access) and in return when I travel around I should then have access to other peoples broadband that have made this same pledge. The scheme is young at the moment, but the final intention would obviously be to WiFi the whole of Britan so that you can get free access wherever you may be. These 2 things combined (GPRS cheaper price and BT WiFi sharing scheme) makes it extremely attractive to try and go travelling around now and carry on working. Perhaps I was a little premature in trying it out 2 years ago, but I did learn a lot, and with these 2 tools to help out next summer I think that I should be able to set up my office somewhere on a beach in the sunshine and carry on as normal.
Well I'll write more here about that as I get closer to the trip, but theoretically we wouldnt be too far away from a PC in a rucksack, a roll up keyboard, and a Z800 headset to allow you to sit down wherever you may be, pop the headset on, roll out the keyboard, and fit in a couple of hours work wherever you may be.
I have seen recent success stories, and other not so successfuly stories.
This is at the front of my mind at the moment because I have just finished writing a project for Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 Devices.
I have always liked the Microsoft Compact Framework, right back from when I was working with Windows Mobile 2002, and leaps forward with some of the frameworks communications tools and GUI controls have made recent projects very impressive for the end users. The latest application I have written is to tie in with a Server application written by us so that it can go out in the field and gather data.
It connects to the network either by a Cradle to PC connection, or a CF card with a SIM card connected to a networks GPRS, or with WiFi hotspots.
Thinking about 2 of these 3 ways of connecting (GPRS and WiFi) I thought I would write a little something down about my experiences with working mobile a couple of years back and what are the differences now.
2 years ago I went travelling with my girlfriend. We ripped the seats out of a Landrover 110 and fitted a double bed, fridge, power points and an auxhilliary battery, so I essentially had a mobile home / office that could off road to some beautiful spots for a few days at a time.
Firstly we took it round the UK for a couple of months because there is always loads on your doorstep that you never appreciate, and back then people were getting into WiFi. A lot of houses had never even heard of encryption and WEP and WPA and it was quite easy to pull up on a roadside, link into a network and send work in and get the next assignment. Hotspots were a little more expensive in that I remember up in Glasgow I wanted to link into the BT hotspot at McDonalds. It was 10 pounds for 24 hours access which wasnt too bad, but when you moved around it was quite difficult to find parking within range of these spots. More often than not I was having to sit in cafes and public places and work which wasnt the plan, I wanted to be sitting on a beach working. I can remember one time up in the Highlands I had no WiFi hotspots nearby and had to rely on my GPRS to work with. Back then it cost £1 per MegaByte. I was working on a flash project which was a 7MB file, so cost £7 to download it, £7 to upload the new one, and I invariably then got comments from the customer to say "Oooh can you just tweak this or change this text". Simple changes, but always cost me another £7 to get the update to them. So back then GPRS was very expensive, and WiFi was too few and far between to be able to rely on it and keep customers happy that they can always get hold of you and get files to and from you.
NOW however I still have my Landy kitted out, and were thinking of heading off again. Only 4 weeks this time, but it is a little too long to leave work totally, so I will be expecting to work on the road again.
With setting up GPRS for my latest project I saw that the deals now are £1 per day (15 MB maximum content) which is fantastic because you can get GPRS coverage from the beach. I have also signed up for a new deal with BT where I allow part of my BT broadband to be used by anyone (public access) and in return when I travel around I should then have access to other peoples broadband that have made this same pledge. The scheme is young at the moment, but the final intention would obviously be to WiFi the whole of Britan so that you can get free access wherever you may be. These 2 things combined (GPRS cheaper price and BT WiFi sharing scheme) makes it extremely attractive to try and go travelling around now and carry on working. Perhaps I was a little premature in trying it out 2 years ago, but I did learn a lot, and with these 2 tools to help out next summer I think that I should be able to set up my office somewhere on a beach in the sunshine and carry on as normal.
Well I'll write more here about that as I get closer to the trip, but theoretically we wouldnt be too far away from a PC in a rucksack, a roll up keyboard, and a Z800 headset to allow you to sit down wherever you may be, pop the headset on, roll out the keyboard, and fit in a couple of hours work wherever you may be.
Friday, 15 June 2007
Business is booming
Well the IT industry seems to have taken off recently.
I was getting right into the Virtual Reality research and where it could go when all of a sudden tons of work came in.
I have been carrying on with search engine optimisation for a customer, which I may as well mention here:
Ahem! (advert coming up.)
For all your CIM, Marketing qualifications, and Chartered Institute of Marketing courses, we offer Distance learning to get your diploma. Check out our corporate deals.
Anyway now thats out of the way, yeah I have also been having to take on employees. That is a change. All of a sudden I am trying to be my usual recluse code monkey, and now I am having to be in contact to get some others up to speed with us.
It's going great and after a few late nights and strong coffees I think we have come through it fairly unscathed.
We are still writing software applications and most of our customers are still based in the Anglia region, but we seem to be moving a lot more onto flash work now and intricate systems that uses a pretty front end.
Anyway I will try and keep a post in here about how the business is changing now. I am having to handle people, but for now I had best get back to it.
H
I was getting right into the Virtual Reality research and where it could go when all of a sudden tons of work came in.
I have been carrying on with search engine optimisation for a customer, which I may as well mention here:
Ahem! (advert coming up.)
For all your CIM, Marketing qualifications, and Chartered Institute of Marketing courses, we offer Distance learning to get your diploma. Check out our corporate deals.
Anyway now thats out of the way, yeah I have also been having to take on employees. That is a change. All of a sudden I am trying to be my usual recluse code monkey, and now I am having to be in contact to get some others up to speed with us.
It's going great and after a few late nights and strong coffees I think we have come through it fairly unscathed.
We are still writing software applications and most of our customers are still based in the Anglia region, but we seem to be moving a lot more onto flash work now and intricate systems that uses a pretty front end.
Anyway I will try and keep a post in here about how the business is changing now. I am having to handle people, but for now I had best get back to it.
H
Thursday, 12 April 2007
Virtual Reality is coming to a PC near you.
Hi again. A quick update to my blog now to show some of what I have been playing with since I wrote my first game to use the Wiimote and nunchuk.
It is obvious that the main intention of the Wiimote and Nunchuk is to provide the gamer with an input device that is a little more realistic than just a joypad with buttons. Part of the Wii's huge popularity at the moment is the fact that you can swing, punch and swoosh the control about and it reacts. People at the moment dont really care that the tennis game doesnt allow you to position your player on the court and tactically read what the other player is doing, as long as it hits the ball when you swing your Wiimote then that is enough for now.
So I had a play around with Wiimote and Nunchuk, and it brought back all of the memories of going to the sea front with my dad when I was a nipper and putting £2.00 (which was a fortune in them days) into the VR machines on the sea front arcades and playing a Dogfighting game with the huge Virtual Reality headsets on.
I find it a bit sad that Virtual Reality didnt take off as much in the end and fully blame the games console for this. Dont get me wrong I love the console, but it did mean that development was lost in the Arcade machine.
On another side note, whatever happened to those Sony Hologram Cowboy machines? They dissapeared off the face of the earth heheh.
Anyway I am detracting.
So I am sitting at home with my new Wiimote Game and I am wondering what can be done to make this kind of thing more immersive and more like Virtual Reality seeing as this is what is being hinted on with the Wii in the first place. I then remember that I have a projector, and some edimensional 3D shutter glasses, so I get them out to play and dust them off and I had a blast.
Now this is something I didnt expect, instead of just copying Wii games and motions, I am now probably the first person who has immersed themselves into a world stood in front of my wall (projector screen) which the shutter glasses makes look full 3D and I am boxing. I am actually seeing the boxing gloves in front of me swinging when I swing my arms. THIS IS GREAT.
And this got me excited.
Perhaps Virtual Reality could get a second wind and make a come back. So now I am thinking about all of the possibilities that a projector, 3D shutter glasses, a wiimote and a nunchuk could actually have, and how this could re crown the PC as the king of the games machines once again.
Before I go on, a brief bit about my games writing history:
I started off 20 years ago writing 2D games moving sprites around on the Commodore 64. I quickly progressed to using STOS on the Atari ST (for those of you not in the know it was a hacked about version of BASIC specifically meant for 2D games writing).
This was all schoolboy hobby stuff and never really went anywhere.
Since then I got my qualifications and got into the wide world of programming applications for business which consisted of loads of grey dialogue boxes with grey buttons that did the job but never looked very cool.
More recently most of the work has gone back to Web applications which although they still need to do the teccy stuff, now demand that they look cool, so programmers had to become designers and vice versa. It was at this time that I realised I could get back into the world of games development and away from the grey boxes. It is also true to say that it is no longer kids spending their £1.99 for a Mastertronic cassette tape down at the local newsagents, but it is a business that is big enough for people who know what they are doing to make a fair bit of money.
Well the good news is I havent forgotten my childhood dreams and I have got back into games development. I have a nice paying contract at the moment for a PC 3D game for a UK company (NDA stops me saying who) and I have had time to mess around with writing a small first game using the Wiimote and Nunchuk as inputs for my own curiosity. Check out previous Blog posts, and my fun stuff website covering it all here.
Needless to say without going down the Wiimote route too far I thought I would have a look and see what has been done specifically for the PC.
WOW - they have even better than the wiimote coming out. I have more details on my website here about my research into this, but I believe I have now taken my interest in this in a whole new direction, and instead of trying to lead a community of developers to make PC games that use Wiimotes, I want to take a closer look at the PC devices that can do far more, and then take a look at how to get ahead of the game and make the PC the ultimate Virtual Reality machine that could salute the Wii but at the same time, show up its limitations in a flash.
Anyway, I just wanted to get my thoughts down really. I need to get back on with some paid work, but the future of gaming looks really good, and I think my vote now goes back to the PC. The 360 and PS3 may have their time now, but PC is always going to be king as far as Virtual Reality fully immersive gaming is concerned.
Like I say check out my website here for a fuller explanation of the devices I have found and how these are going to shape the future of gaming.
Cheers,
L.
It is obvious that the main intention of the Wiimote and Nunchuk is to provide the gamer with an input device that is a little more realistic than just a joypad with buttons. Part of the Wii's huge popularity at the moment is the fact that you can swing, punch and swoosh the control about and it reacts. People at the moment dont really care that the tennis game doesnt allow you to position your player on the court and tactically read what the other player is doing, as long as it hits the ball when you swing your Wiimote then that is enough for now.
So I had a play around with Wiimote and Nunchuk, and it brought back all of the memories of going to the sea front with my dad when I was a nipper and putting £2.00 (which was a fortune in them days) into the VR machines on the sea front arcades and playing a Dogfighting game with the huge Virtual Reality headsets on.
I find it a bit sad that Virtual Reality didnt take off as much in the end and fully blame the games console for this. Dont get me wrong I love the console, but it did mean that development was lost in the Arcade machine.
On another side note, whatever happened to those Sony Hologram Cowboy machines? They dissapeared off the face of the earth heheh.
Anyway I am detracting.
So I am sitting at home with my new Wiimote Game and I am wondering what can be done to make this kind of thing more immersive and more like Virtual Reality seeing as this is what is being hinted on with the Wii in the first place. I then remember that I have a projector, and some edimensional 3D shutter glasses, so I get them out to play and dust them off and I had a blast.
Now this is something I didnt expect, instead of just copying Wii games and motions, I am now probably the first person who has immersed themselves into a world stood in front of my wall (projector screen) which the shutter glasses makes look full 3D and I am boxing. I am actually seeing the boxing gloves in front of me swinging when I swing my arms. THIS IS GREAT.
And this got me excited.
Perhaps Virtual Reality could get a second wind and make a come back. So now I am thinking about all of the possibilities that a projector, 3D shutter glasses, a wiimote and a nunchuk could actually have, and how this could re crown the PC as the king of the games machines once again.
Before I go on, a brief bit about my games writing history:
I started off 20 years ago writing 2D games moving sprites around on the Commodore 64. I quickly progressed to using STOS on the Atari ST (for those of you not in the know it was a hacked about version of BASIC specifically meant for 2D games writing).
This was all schoolboy hobby stuff and never really went anywhere.
Since then I got my qualifications and got into the wide world of programming applications for business which consisted of loads of grey dialogue boxes with grey buttons that did the job but never looked very cool.
More recently most of the work has gone back to Web applications which although they still need to do the teccy stuff, now demand that they look cool, so programmers had to become designers and vice versa. It was at this time that I realised I could get back into the world of games development and away from the grey boxes. It is also true to say that it is no longer kids spending their £1.99 for a Mastertronic cassette tape down at the local newsagents, but it is a business that is big enough for people who know what they are doing to make a fair bit of money.
Well the good news is I havent forgotten my childhood dreams and I have got back into games development. I have a nice paying contract at the moment for a PC 3D game for a UK company (NDA stops me saying who) and I have had time to mess around with writing a small first game using the Wiimote and Nunchuk as inputs for my own curiosity. Check out previous Blog posts, and my fun stuff website covering it all here.
Needless to say without going down the Wiimote route too far I thought I would have a look and see what has been done specifically for the PC.
WOW - they have even better than the wiimote coming out. I have more details on my website here about my research into this, but I believe I have now taken my interest in this in a whole new direction, and instead of trying to lead a community of developers to make PC games that use Wiimotes, I want to take a closer look at the PC devices that can do far more, and then take a look at how to get ahead of the game and make the PC the ultimate Virtual Reality machine that could salute the Wii but at the same time, show up its limitations in a flash.
Anyway, I just wanted to get my thoughts down really. I need to get back on with some paid work, but the future of gaming looks really good, and I think my vote now goes back to the PC. The 360 and PS3 may have their time now, but PC is always going to be king as far as Virtual Reality fully immersive gaming is concerned.
Like I say check out my website here for a fuller explanation of the devices I have found and how these are going to shape the future of gaming.
Cheers,
L.
Friday, 30 March 2007
Wiimote PC 3d Games controller motion logger
This is an update for where I am with writing PC Games that utilise the Wiimote and Nunchuk.
I firstly got a blank 3D world going in TrueVision3D which I have mentioned on the previous post. Once I had this world with a wiimote and my banana I realised that it is actually a difficult task to study the acceleration outputs of the wiimote and nunchuk and to translate them into motions in a 3D world.
I decided to implement the C# WiimoteLib version 1.0.1.0 from Brian Peek (thanks Brian). There is a test program that comes with his driver that displays all of the outputs of the Wiimote and Nunchuk in a nice little windows application. I have taken that test program and edited it a bit to give me some reuslts that I want to find useful and use for motion translations with my 3D games. The outputs displayed that I am interested in are straight forward float numbers showing the X,Y, and Z axis accelerations of the Wiimote and Nunchuk (-0.5 to +0.5 in strength). I figured that there would be some kind of a pattern to these outputs that would be the same for certain motions. To demonstrate what I have changed in Brians test code consider the following: Lets say you want to play a game like fishing and essentially you want to cast out the rod. Firstly you will raise the wiimote so it will rotate slowly upwards while being raised about 1 foot. Then as it is stationary the only acceleration will be gravity (9.81 metres per second squared in the vertical direction). Then as you whip it acceleration will change to downwards in the vertical and the wiimote will rotate again back to its starting position. This whole motion will show 3 patterns of accelerations, so you can then say when the player is doing a cast because the wiimote outputs will be in a similar pattern to this varying in strength.
I have written a program to try and help me to log all of these motion patterns that I need, and full details of it can be seen here on the Wiimote PC Games section of my fun stuff website.
The next phase should be incorporating these movements to my character in my 3D world and then I can give this character some tasks. Most probably breaking things and smashing stuff up to start with as the punching motion is a fairly straight forward one to get right and measure player strength.
Cheers,
L.
I firstly got a blank 3D world going in TrueVision3D which I have mentioned on the previous post. Once I had this world with a wiimote and my banana I realised that it is actually a difficult task to study the acceleration outputs of the wiimote and nunchuk and to translate them into motions in a 3D world.
I decided to implement the C# WiimoteLib version 1.0.1.0 from Brian Peek (thanks Brian). There is a test program that comes with his driver that displays all of the outputs of the Wiimote and Nunchuk in a nice little windows application. I have taken that test program and edited it a bit to give me some reuslts that I want to find useful and use for motion translations with my 3D games. The outputs displayed that I am interested in are straight forward float numbers showing the X,Y, and Z axis accelerations of the Wiimote and Nunchuk (-0.5 to +0.5 in strength). I figured that there would be some kind of a pattern to these outputs that would be the same for certain motions. To demonstrate what I have changed in Brians test code consider the following: Lets say you want to play a game like fishing and essentially you want to cast out the rod. Firstly you will raise the wiimote so it will rotate slowly upwards while being raised about 1 foot. Then as it is stationary the only acceleration will be gravity (9.81 metres per second squared in the vertical direction). Then as you whip it acceleration will change to downwards in the vertical and the wiimote will rotate again back to its starting position. This whole motion will show 3 patterns of accelerations, so you can then say when the player is doing a cast because the wiimote outputs will be in a similar pattern to this varying in strength.
I have written a program to try and help me to log all of these motion patterns that I need, and full details of it can be seen here on the Wiimote PC Games section of my fun stuff website.
The next phase should be incorporating these movements to my character in my 3D world and then I can give this character some tasks. Most probably breaking things and smashing stuff up to start with as the punching motion is a fairly straight forward one to get right and measure player strength.
Cheers,
L.
Friday, 16 March 2007
Wiimote and Nunchuk applications on the PC
I have had a couple of days spare between jobs and I thought about some viral marketing for our sister website for fun and useful applications to experiment with. Partly because it is always good for a company, but also because it gives me a chance to write something funky and fun.
Games are always a passion of mine, and I have gained some skills recently with the Truevision 3D games engine, specifically to do with First Person Shooter (FPS) style gameplay. While looking around I became amazed by the breakthrough that has been made with getting the nintendo wii controls to work on a PC. There seems to be a few drivers emerging now and I have had a look at them to see what would aid me the best in a C# set of PC 3D games.
The best used wiimote driver has to be the GlovePIE set up.
I have found problems with this, in that you have to run the GlovePIE program and run a script before you can run your own program. This is too fidly for me. I then saw that somebody had embedded a wiimote driver inside a Half Life 2 mod which looked much better. They havent released their source code yet, so I have had to look elsewhere.
At the moment I am settling on one of two solutions:
1- A C++ driver that I should be able to translate to C# and embed
2- A C# driver.
I think I will go for the C# one because I believe that includes nunchuk support.
I think these drivers will be getting better and more robust. If they could attempt an auto pair setup with the wiimotes then that would be excellent but for now, you have to go through pairing the wiimote yourself before running any code. A quick hint on doing this is hold down the wiimote buttons 1+2, and add bluetooth device, then skip pairing and click finish, the wiimote should now be useable with your PC (I know some bluetooth stacks have had problems with this but I now think that these issues are fixed).
Anyway onto the game. The control is excellent, I have played around with oscillators and seen exactly what the PC reads when the wii is held in all manor of positions and moved.
I am not using the sensor bar for the main reason that I would like it if somebody could just go and buy a wiimote for around £30 and start using it on the PC. The sensor bar is only for steadying the pointer anyway so it isnt needed for the types of games I am thinking of doing.
This does lead me to think that there could be a whole new market opening up here for the PC gaming market. Nintendo have recently announced that they are selling their games development kits for around $2000, which while it is a lot cheaper than development kits for other consoles, it still isn't as cheap as Visual C# Express for the PC (its free). This means there is guaranteed to be a lot more homebrewers ready to develop games on the PC platform but using the wiimote's original input style. It also means there is a much bigger audience for the games.
While trying to find out the legalities with this and what Nintendo may try and do about it, I have come to the conlcusion that if I write a game for the PC, but it also caters for wiimote and nunchuk controlling then that should keep me legal as far as releasing any games to the masses.
I didnt want to get bogged down with the 3D graphics, and game design yet until I was sure that all pieces of the puzzle would work together. So for my first test I have so far put together a little world that you can run around, and in front of you are two objects: A wiimote, and a banana. These items were grabbed from the Google sketchup warehouse, there is no nunchuk there so that is why I chose a banana as it is a similar shape. At the moment the objects mimmick what the user is doing with the wiimote and nunchuk so I am now at a stage where I can introduce objects and physics and rules into the world to come up with some games.
My world screens:
I will keep my findings updated here and on my nintendo wii PC DOTNET section of our sister website. Next I will start to introduce some more objects, and physics and rules.
I dont want to list the ideas as I want to be the first to do them.
Cheers,
altFusion team.
Games are always a passion of mine, and I have gained some skills recently with the Truevision 3D games engine, specifically to do with First Person Shooter (FPS) style gameplay. While looking around I became amazed by the breakthrough that has been made with getting the nintendo wii controls to work on a PC. There seems to be a few drivers emerging now and I have had a look at them to see what would aid me the best in a C# set of PC 3D games.
The best used wiimote driver has to be the GlovePIE set up.
I have found problems with this, in that you have to run the GlovePIE program and run a script before you can run your own program. This is too fidly for me. I then saw that somebody had embedded a wiimote driver inside a Half Life 2 mod which looked much better. They havent released their source code yet, so I have had to look elsewhere.
At the moment I am settling on one of two solutions:
1- A C++ driver that I should be able to translate to C# and embed
2- A C# driver.
I think I will go for the C# one because I believe that includes nunchuk support.
I think these drivers will be getting better and more robust. If they could attempt an auto pair setup with the wiimotes then that would be excellent but for now, you have to go through pairing the wiimote yourself before running any code. A quick hint on doing this is hold down the wiimote buttons 1+2, and add bluetooth device, then skip pairing and click finish, the wiimote should now be useable with your PC (I know some bluetooth stacks have had problems with this but I now think that these issues are fixed).
Anyway onto the game. The control is excellent, I have played around with oscillators and seen exactly what the PC reads when the wii is held in all manor of positions and moved.
I am not using the sensor bar for the main reason that I would like it if somebody could just go and buy a wiimote for around £30 and start using it on the PC. The sensor bar is only for steadying the pointer anyway so it isnt needed for the types of games I am thinking of doing.
This does lead me to think that there could be a whole new market opening up here for the PC gaming market. Nintendo have recently announced that they are selling their games development kits for around $2000, which while it is a lot cheaper than development kits for other consoles, it still isn't as cheap as Visual C# Express for the PC (its free). This means there is guaranteed to be a lot more homebrewers ready to develop games on the PC platform but using the wiimote's original input style. It also means there is a much bigger audience for the games.
While trying to find out the legalities with this and what Nintendo may try and do about it, I have come to the conlcusion that if I write a game for the PC, but it also caters for wiimote and nunchuk controlling then that should keep me legal as far as releasing any games to the masses.
I didnt want to get bogged down with the 3D graphics, and game design yet until I was sure that all pieces of the puzzle would work together. So for my first test I have so far put together a little world that you can run around, and in front of you are two objects: A wiimote, and a banana. These items were grabbed from the Google sketchup warehouse, there is no nunchuk there so that is why I chose a banana as it is a similar shape. At the moment the objects mimmick what the user is doing with the wiimote and nunchuk so I am now at a stage where I can introduce objects and physics and rules into the world to come up with some games.
My world screens:
I will keep my findings updated here and on my nintendo wii PC DOTNET section of our sister website. Next I will start to introduce some more objects, and physics and rules.
I dont want to list the ideas as I want to be the first to do them.
Cheers,
altFusion team.
Monday, 12 March 2007
altFusion is now running on other domain names.
We have recently registered some other domain names.
I know that this doesn’t help out with Search Engine Optimisation for our main Cambridge and Peterborough Software IT website, but it does stop anybody else buying up the domains and hurting our web presence. Each domain also has their own page ranking for the pages inside them, and although I am not actively going to promote the other domains, they might bring more traffic in just by being there and allowing indexing over time.
Domains we have now registered and a brief description about that type of domain top level extension are:
1/
http://www.altfusion.biz/ - A general online business extension and altFusion is an IT online business.
2/
http://www.altfusion.net/ - A general extension to say we are on the Internet.
3/
http://www.altfusion.org/ - A worldwide organisation domain. As long as it isn’t postfixed with the uk subdomain then there aren’t restrictions on it like it having to be a charity organisation.
4/
http://www.altfusion.eu/ - A European Union domain extension, that suggests that altFusion is a European company that offers IT solutions and applications for the whole of Europe as well as the UK.
5/
http://www.altfusion.info/ - This is for an information website, and along with this blog I believe that altFusion can always be welcome to offer advice to somebody as well as to provide a full IT system or software application.
We dont see any need to register any other domain names at the moment.
Just as a side note, I have already mentioned that we have got a fun website filled with Games and Gadgets and Widgets and things to experiment with here.
I know that this doesn’t help out with Search Engine Optimisation for our main Cambridge and Peterborough Software IT website, but it does stop anybody else buying up the domains and hurting our web presence. Each domain also has their own page ranking for the pages inside them, and although I am not actively going to promote the other domains, they might bring more traffic in just by being there and allowing indexing over time.
Domains we have now registered and a brief description about that type of domain top level extension are:
1/
http://www.altfusion.biz/ - A general online business extension and altFusion is an IT online business.
2/
http://www.altfusion.net/ - A general extension to say we are on the Internet.
3/
http://www.altfusion.org/ - A worldwide organisation domain. As long as it isn’t postfixed with the uk subdomain then there aren’t restrictions on it like it having to be a charity organisation.
4/
http://www.altfusion.eu/ - A European Union domain extension, that suggests that altFusion is a European company that offers IT solutions and applications for the whole of Europe as well as the UK.
5/
http://www.altfusion.info/ - This is for an information website, and along with this blog I believe that altFusion can always be welcome to offer advice to somebody as well as to provide a full IT system or software application.
We dont see any need to register any other domain names at the moment.
Just as a side note, I have already mentioned that we have got a fun website filled with Games and Gadgets and Widgets and things to experiment with here.
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Anglia software developers - how far afield do we go.
I thought I would write a little something about my marketing findings and the way that standard search engine optimisation (SEO) seems to be pulling solutions away from geographic locations. This is also generating new problems for customers who are looking for a bespoke I.T. solutions provider and would prefer to find one near to them.
altFusion is based in Anglia (offices in Cambridge and Peterborough). I would say that only about twenty five percent of our customers are actually based in the Anglia region however. Currently there's the Cambridge Professional Academy based in Cambridge, The Edge Agency based in Elseworth, BEA building and clay products based in Huntingdon, and St Edmundsbury and Uttlesford Councils.
This doesn’t usually produce a problem in that we can work remotely, and would only need to meet the customer once to gain their trust and then we can be left to work and communicate through the internet to build their bespoke applications.
Some solutions do require more travelling. We have had to travel to places like Westminster and to the Welsh National Assembly a lot more for researching and systems implementation.
As I have said earlier, some customers might want to find a solutions provider that lives close to them as it gives them a piece of mind that they can visit any time and keep more of an eye on their solution/application to aid them with their project control. But with the communications revolution at the stage where it is now, it allows the same trust and control to be built up no matter how far apart the solutions providers and customers may be.
One main example of the way this may be hurting customers finding providers is; recently I received a request from a company in Leeds who used an American website to find a UK software application programmer. The website was taking bids in dollars only - so was meant for USA contracts to be advertised and found.
The truth is that their solution was a simple back office product using Coldfusion and MySQL, and chances are there would probably be a solutions provider that could of done it for them that are based within 2 or 3 miles of their offices.
It seems a shame that they now have to pay this USA company royalties and go through their Escrow payments system, and lose more money to try and find their solutions provider, when they are probably working to a set budget for the whole software application anyway.
One very good way that I like of getting around this problem is the Google Maps directory, and the Microsoft Local directories of companies. I believe that this will revolutionise the way that customers can find people to provide applications, programs or anything really. I would like to see more of gmaps and MS Local being used in other areas of the web say in things like ebay bids, so that you can know how far away something is from you visually and instantly, to see if you would rather collect it yourself, than pay the delivery charge.
I think that wanted ads and requests would also benefit from these mapping services greatly so that you can request something and specify a radius from a central point of where you would like that request answered. This would make the sourcing of solutions providers vastly more efficient for the company with the problem, and then the money spent on a solution could be spent more on its development rather on the advertising and procurement process.
I do have a lot of experience with writing Google gmaps solutions, and I guess I could easily write something to be used with that to answer this problem, but I am dubious at the moment until the great war of who will come out on top has been answered: Google maps or Microsoft Local.
Just as a footnote, I think that Yahoo have lost out on this war. I have seen their local directories, and I tried to get my company listed with them, but they say that their directory listings for the UK are taken from the BT phone book listings. When exploring this further and seeing if I could get us listed with BT so that in turn we could then get listed on Yahoo local directories, I found out that it costs over £300 per year to do this. For this reason I think Yahoo will only ever have a local directory of large businesses with a large marketing budget.
Google’s free way of sending you a PIN number to your location to prove that you are where you say you are will allow them to stay secure, not get full of spam companies and will allow them to keep a FAR more substantial listing of all businesses.
Microsoft take their UK local listings from Thomson Local which allows a free listing so they will also keep secure and allow smaller businesses with low marketing budgets to keep local listings on there.
So my conclusion is there may be an area where bespoke systems can still solve local searching of different things, adding to the functionality of Google maps and/or Microsoft Local. Hopefully I can start to identify some of these and see if I can be one of the providers of these systems. I think for a company's potential customers trying to procure services, then steering them away from a normal search engine and results towards this geographic search could be a benefit to them as well.
altFusion is based in Anglia (offices in Cambridge and Peterborough). I would say that only about twenty five percent of our customers are actually based in the Anglia region however. Currently there's the Cambridge Professional Academy based in Cambridge, The Edge Agency based in Elseworth, BEA building and clay products based in Huntingdon, and St Edmundsbury and Uttlesford Councils.
This doesn’t usually produce a problem in that we can work remotely, and would only need to meet the customer once to gain their trust and then we can be left to work and communicate through the internet to build their bespoke applications.
Some solutions do require more travelling. We have had to travel to places like Westminster and to the Welsh National Assembly a lot more for researching and systems implementation.
As I have said earlier, some customers might want to find a solutions provider that lives close to them as it gives them a piece of mind that they can visit any time and keep more of an eye on their solution/application to aid them with their project control. But with the communications revolution at the stage where it is now, it allows the same trust and control to be built up no matter how far apart the solutions providers and customers may be.
One main example of the way this may be hurting customers finding providers is; recently I received a request from a company in Leeds who used an American website to find a UK software application programmer. The website was taking bids in dollars only - so was meant for USA contracts to be advertised and found.
The truth is that their solution was a simple back office product using Coldfusion and MySQL, and chances are there would probably be a solutions provider that could of done it for them that are based within 2 or 3 miles of their offices.
It seems a shame that they now have to pay this USA company royalties and go through their Escrow payments system, and lose more money to try and find their solutions provider, when they are probably working to a set budget for the whole software application anyway.
One very good way that I like of getting around this problem is the Google Maps directory, and the Microsoft Local directories of companies. I believe that this will revolutionise the way that customers can find people to provide applications, programs or anything really. I would like to see more of gmaps and MS Local being used in other areas of the web say in things like ebay bids, so that you can know how far away something is from you visually and instantly, to see if you would rather collect it yourself, than pay the delivery charge.
I think that wanted ads and requests would also benefit from these mapping services greatly so that you can request something and specify a radius from a central point of where you would like that request answered. This would make the sourcing of solutions providers vastly more efficient for the company with the problem, and then the money spent on a solution could be spent more on its development rather on the advertising and procurement process.
I do have a lot of experience with writing Google gmaps solutions, and I guess I could easily write something to be used with that to answer this problem, but I am dubious at the moment until the great war of who will come out on top has been answered: Google maps or Microsoft Local.
Just as a footnote, I think that Yahoo have lost out on this war. I have seen their local directories, and I tried to get my company listed with them, but they say that their directory listings for the UK are taken from the BT phone book listings. When exploring this further and seeing if I could get us listed with BT so that in turn we could then get listed on Yahoo local directories, I found out that it costs over £300 per year to do this. For this reason I think Yahoo will only ever have a local directory of large businesses with a large marketing budget.
Google’s free way of sending you a PIN number to your location to prove that you are where you say you are will allow them to stay secure, not get full of spam companies and will allow them to keep a FAR more substantial listing of all businesses.
Microsoft take their UK local listings from Thomson Local which allows a free listing so they will also keep secure and allow smaller businesses with low marketing budgets to keep local listings on there.
So my conclusion is there may be an area where bespoke systems can still solve local searching of different things, adding to the functionality of Google maps and/or Microsoft Local. Hopefully I can start to identify some of these and see if I can be one of the providers of these systems. I think for a company's potential customers trying to procure services, then steering them away from a normal search engine and results towards this geographic search could be a benefit to them as well.
Sunday, 11 February 2007
Working with a new graphics man
altFusion are pleased to announce bringing on board the graphical skills of Dave Rendle to help with the styling and graphics of phase 2 of a 3D Game for the PC.
The game is a new area of development for altfusion, and phase 1 was accepted back in November which proved to be a successful transition from current applications that altfusion have tackled.
We look forward to what the team can present for the next phase, and hopefully we can continue to provide this kind of solution with a view to move into the Console market as well as PC.
The game is a new area of development for altfusion, and phase 1 was accepted back in November which proved to be a successful transition from current applications that altfusion have tackled.
We look forward to what the team can present for the next phase, and hopefully we can continue to provide this kind of solution with a view to move into the Console market as well as PC.
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