Gaming

Tub of War Game by Martin aka Quill18 (Ludum Dare 38)

This weekend the Ludum Dare game jam and competition took place.

Due to too many other obligations I wasn’t able to take part, but I was able to watch a little while Martin created a great game by himself in just 48 hours. He did it live on Twitch, which apparently he has done for quite a while now.

I really like the idea of a timed jam which forces you to focus on just what is needed to get done.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know that a favorite book of mine is Essentialism. Everything comes with a tradeoff. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else – maybe even everything else.

When you are creating something under a time constraint, it forces you to think like an essentialist. You can only do a few things, so focus on them.

You can grab the source code and the executables on Martin’s site at http://quill18.com/ld38/

I made a quick video of me trying out the game Tub of War.

Chad Carter Leave a comment

Preparing for Microsoft Mixed Reality Partners

Last week my machine decided to freeze up. I had installed the latest NVIDIA graphics drivers and Windows also decided to install updates. When I came down to work on my video I was greeted with black screens. After rebooting, I kept getting the blue screen of death.

I won’t go into all the details here as I don’t want to bore my email readers as I talked about it last week, but I will say that after spending time working through the issue I decided it was time to update my graphics adapter.

I had my eye on the GTX 1080 Ti and went ahead and bought it after my blue screen escapades. I’m not too upset because now I’m ready for the upcoming collaborative headsets from Acer, ASUS, HP, Dell and Lenovo.

To be clear, none of these devices will require this powerful of a device. In fact, the devices will need less horsepower than those running HTC Vive or the Rift. An i5 with an Intel HD graphics 620 (GT2) equivalent or greater DirectX 12 API capable GPU is the critical pieces that need to be in place.

I can’t wait for these devices to ship. My understanding from reading online articles is that developers editions should be shipping soon with a possibility for consumer versions to be released in time for the holiday season.

The video this week is an unboxing video of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti from NVIDIA. I hope you enjoy it.

Chad Carter Leave a comment

HoloValentine App Submitted and Source Code Available

YouTubeThumbnail

The HoloValentine app created and submitted to the store and is going through certification.

The source code for this app is available for free.

The Unity project includes spatial mapping along with a custom spatial mapping shader. It includes speech recognition and storing and retrieving world anchors. The CSharpSynth code has been adapted to work with Unity and UWP apps in particular so that MIDI files can be played. Regular audio clips are played. The Mecanim state machine was used to a great degree to animate the text and the candy boxes.

This simple game has a solid code base that should be beneficial to anyone looking to do Holographic development using Unity. In fact, it should be beneficial to anyone interested in Unity development regardless if it is mixed reality or not.

I hope you grab the code and enjoy using it. If you have questions leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to get you an answer as time allows.

Here is a video where I talk about the app and show it off a little bit more. I’m hoping the game passes certification soon and makes it in the store before Valentine’s Day.

 

Update: The app passed certification and can be found on the Windows Store at:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/holovalentine/9n20ttvcxh2q

Note: It is only available for the HoloLens

Chad Carter 2 Comments

Xbox Achievements: Becomes the Master

I enjoy playing games. I haven’t been able to play them in a while.

However, I have spent a little bit of time in the last month dusting off the controller to play again…

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I bought Titanfall 2 during a Black Friday sales.

I’ve completed the game and completed all the achievements, including the “…Becomes the Master” achievement. It took much less time to complete the sequel’s achievements than the original Titanfall, thankfully 🙂

The requirement of this particular achievement is to go through the gauntlet and get at least 3rd in the leaderboard. The time to beat is 33.65. This is a lot more difficult than one may think.

It took many times of trying, but I finally got it. I recorded it and am sharing tips in case you want to go for this achievement.

I’m sort of continuing my vacation from last week with this week’s video as I didn’t work on anything HoloLens specific for my blog and YouTube channel. Instead, I’ve been spending time on this December’s master class over at Learn HoloLens. If you want to be notified the next time the membership opens, go ahead and sign up on the wait list.

In the mean time, enjoy some Titanfall 2.

Let me know in the comments what games you like playing and what the hardest achievement was that you’ve completed (or not) …

Chad Carter Leave a comment