RJ's Blog

Triangler wins the IMGA (International Mobile Gaming Awards)

2007-02-19T09:17:00-06:00:00

The mobile gps game Triangler that I've been working on has won two prizes at this year's International Mobile Gaming Awards. One for most innovative game and the overall Grand Prix.
I'm really happy !!!! All the hard work has paid off!

The offical press release from the jury :

'The Jury of the International Mobile Gaming Awards picked 6 winners out of the 26 nominees from the US, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, India, the UK, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Sweden and Australia. The 2006 edition presented a new breed of games never presented before: outdoor, location based gaming, high-end 3D, Massive Multiplayer Mobile Games, Mobile-to-PC and Mobile-to-TV games and games using all the features of the new generation of mobile devices: including connectivity, camera and microphone. These avant-garde games that are paving the way for tomorrow’s mobile entertainment were brought to the spotlight last night in a crowded Fira Palace Hotel, in front of the press and hundreds of representatives of the industry.

TNO, the largest research institute in the Netherlands, with 4000 professionals in many disciplines, received the US $15,000 Grand Prix Award and the US$ 5,000 Most Innovative Game Award for its game Triangler, an Outdoor, Mobile Multiplayer game using GPS .'

Our offical site can be found here.

Portable Retro gaming with GP2X

2007-02-14T14:16:00-06:00:00

I am a bit of a fanatic when it comes to retro gaming. I own a Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga 500, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Sega Megadrive, Sega Dreamcast, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance and alot of Nintendo Game & Watch games. Ofcourse I have al sorts of emulators for these systems on my PC and XBOX, but I didn't have a portable solution to play all these games. But this changed when I bought the GP2X. A portable open source mini computer with 2 processors that can run commercial software as well as homebrew software. There are lots of open source emulators and programs available for it, so you can play all your favorite games. The device has a USB connection and an SD memory card slot. I must say that not all emulators are created equal :-) The best ones are the Sega Megadrive / Genesis emulator and the NeoGeo emulator (Metal Slug is still a great game). Sadly I have yet to find a good Super Nintendo emulator.
You can find a lot of the software here.
Further more you can watch Xvid video with it, but I'm not too thrilled about the quality of the image I must say.
A downside of the GP2X is the battery life. It uses 2 AA batteries and if you use rechargeables like I do, they are empty in just over an hour or so. So the adapter is really necessary if you want to keep on playing.
At the moment I use it primarily to play Megadrive and NeoGeo games with it, and have an SD card in it with every Megadrive game ever released.
A must have for the real retro gamer!

Windows Media Center vs Samsung DCB-P850R

2007-02-02T07:53:00-06:00:00

Last weekend I bought a Samsung DCB-P850R PVR to make digital cable recordings. I already had PVR solution where I connect my XBOX with my Microsoft Media Center PC, but was not completely satisfied with this because I could only record analog TV with it.

So, now I can record digital TV as well, for which I'm really happy, but there are still some features that are missing.
Here's a comparison between the Samsung PVR and MCE.

Pros of Samsung PVR

Being able to record digital TV ; better quality and much more channels
The machine is very quiet
Not having to have 2 devices running to watch TV (PC + XBOX)
Being able to play MP3's from the HD of the PVR
Being able to connect a USB device to the PVR

Cons of Samsung PVR

Recordings are time based and not content based. On MCE I could give the order to record all episodes of CSI for example and it would scan all available channels for the show. The Samsung just records on a certain time slot that can be repeated every week, every day or every workday. So now, if the air time of my favorite show changes I have to take action myself..
The Samsung cannot record and play a show at the same time. On my MCE I sometimes did 'chase watching', where I started to record a show at for example 20.00 and then tuned in at 20.20. I could then skip all the commercial breaks and at the end of the show I was watching realtime.
When I watch a show and press the 'stop' button halfway the duration of the show, the Samsung doesn't remember where I was and I have to skip to the right point the next time I want to watch the rest. You can set bookmarks, but this is a manual action that you sometimes forget.

Well, for the time being I will probably keep using both solutions to get the best experience, but I keep hoping that someday a device will emerge that can handle all my whishes.

The Samsung DCB-P850R

Animating a Polygon in WPF using PathGeometry

2007-01-24T09:34:00-06:00:00

For a visualisation engine that I'm building I wanted to dynamically create polygons and animate them using WPF. I found out that there wasn't a lot of information about this out there on the web (only in XAML and not in code), so that's why I want to share this with you.

I am using a standard WPF project to demonstrate the animation. You need to add the System.Windows.Media.Animation namespace to the using statements. As you can see I am not using the Polygon type, because I haven't figured out how I can animate the Points inside a PointCollection . If anyone does know how to do this from code I would really like to hear it.

The code will create a PathGeometry consisting of LineSegments that have Points. The LineSegment's PointProperty will be animated.

Point pt1 = new Point(10, 10);
Point pt1to = new Point(100, 120);
Point pt2 = new Point(100, 10);
Point pt2to = new Point(150, 30);
Point pt3 = new Point(50, 50);
Point pt3to = new Point(30, 80);
PathGeometry pgeom = new PathGeometry();
PathFigure pfig1 = new PathFigure();

LineSegment ls1 = new LineSegment(pt1, true);
LineSegment ls2 = new LineSegment(pt2, true);
LineSegment ls3 = new LineSegment(pt3, true);

PointAnimation pa1 = new PointAnimation(pt1to, new Duration(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 4)));
PointAnimation pa2 = new PointAnimation(pt2to, new Duration(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 4)));
PointAnimation pa3 = new PointAnimation(pt3to, new Duration(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 4)));

pfig1.StartPoint = pt3;
pfig1.Segments.Add(ls1);
pfig1.Segments.Add(ls2);
pfig1.Segments.Add(ls3);

pgeom.Figures.Add(pfig1);
Path myPath = new Path();
myPath.Stroke = Brushes.Black;
myPath.StrokeThickness = 3;
myPath.Fill = Brushes.Blue;
myPath.Data = pgeom;

// Add this to the Grid I named 'MyGrid'
MyGrid.Children.Add(myPath);

ls1.BeginAnimation(LineSegment.PointProperty, pa1);
ls2.BeginAnimation(LineSegment.PointProperty, pa2);
ls3.BeginAnimation(LineSegment.PointProperty, pa3);
pfig1.BeginAnimation(PathFigure.StartPointProperty, pa3);

Have fun with it!

Triangler : massive multiplayer collaborative geometric outdoor mobile game (in .Net)

2007-01-10T11:58:00-06:00:00

Recently I have been working on a very cool project called Triangler. This is a multiplayer game that you play on your mobile phone. You play in one of two teams that compete with each other. The goal of the game is to position yourself in a way that you create equilateral triangles on a map. So you and your teammates have to move around to get yourself in the right position. To get points you have to enclose people from the opposite team inside this triangle.
The game has been nominated for the International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA) 2006 ;

The software for this game consists of two parts : the mobile client and the game server.
I built the game server using Windows Workflow Foundation State machine to keep track of the game state and the states of the triangles that are being formed during the game.
For the visualization I used Windows Presentation Foundation ; it's really a lot easier now to create impressive animating graphics I think!
The mobile client was built with the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC SDK.

For me this was a nice way to experiment and to get some feeling with these techniques.

I will be posting some screenshots of the game in a short while here.

Introducing myself

2007-01-10T11:45:00-06:00:00

My name is Robert-Jan Zandvoort. I live in the Netherlands and am currently working for a company called TNO ICT where I design architectures and make proof of concept implementations of innovative services.
My technical interests go mostly to Microsoft technologies ( C#, Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation, Windows Mobile, XDA)

On this blog I will be posting about the things in life that keep me busy, such as the projects that I am currently working on.

I hope you will enjoy reading this blog and come back often.

Robert-Jan