Software

Mobile vs Web gaming
Games on mobiles are not new, neither are multiplayer games, but Macrospace have teamed up with Certus to go a step further, by allowing players to compete in real-time using their mobile phones with not only other mobile users, but also PC users via their web browser.
Global mobile to mobile, Web to mobile gaming creates a whole new multiplayer dynamic. Designed for the more casual gamers, Macrospace hopes to attract a broad range of people who are already familiar with web-based games, but who may not yet appreciate the gaming potential of their mobile phone. The new games, developed in partnership with Denmark’s Certus, use powerful server-side technologies to create a robust multiplayer platform that is simple for even novice users, and three have been launched for openers.

Multiplayer Four-in-a-row challenges you to get four counters in a row before your opponent, while the multiplayer version of the timeless game of strategy, Multiplayer Reversi, allows you to challenge your friends anytime, anywhere in real-time. Finally, Multiplayer Battle Ocean encourages you to sink your opponents’ fleet of ships before he sinks yours. Players can also chat to each other seamlessly between mobile and Web.
The games can be played across any Java-enabled mobile or Web platform, and they have been specifically designed to work across 2G, 2.5G and 3G technology, using turn-based gameplay that suits the technical limitations of existing handsets and networks.
Most importantly, for player kudos, Macrospace multiplayer games utilise global ranking and high scores, allowing users to view other players’ scores and select opponents of a similar skill level. They can also create a permanent username, circumventing the need to create a new one for every game they purchase. It’s a real virtual community affair as Certus’ technology allows operators and portals to run tournaments and create competition leagues.
People used to miss bus and train stops because they fell asleep or were engrossed in a good book, now it will be because they are preoccupied with multiplayer global intrigue on the tiny screen.
Macrospace
Certus
22 October, 2004
Halo 2 – Breaking Records Even Before Release
Halo 2 day is approaching and the worst thing that can happen to a gamer on that auspicious day is to encounter a technical fault with his xBox. Not even the genetically enhanced super-soldier, Master Chief could help him out on this one. He’d be too busy acting as a buffer between the relentless Covenant and the destruction of all humankind.
Halo 2 has broken video game records, with pre-orders of more than 1.5 million in the US alone and is even projected to bring in more revenue than any day one box office blockbuster movie including Spider-man 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Matrix: Reloaded. No other game has ever surpassed one million.
Some 6,500 US stores plan to open just after midnight on Tuesday 9 November for the game’s release, and the Toys R Us in Times Square, New York, will sell the very first copy. Halo 2 will be released in the UK and Ireland on November 11th. Many are already dubbing this Halo Flu day, predicting the number of people taking the day off sick.
Five million copies of the original Halo: Combat Evolved, were sold on Xbox, PC and Mac platforms, so one can only imagine that it successor will at the very least equal this figure.
Halo 2’s burnished armour may have been slightly dulled by the release of a reportedly French language pirate version onto the Internet last week with illicit code turning up on a several piracy websites and newsgroups – a development which apparently angered many fans. Not surprisingly, Microsoft intends to pursue the culprits using the full rigour of the law.
The people at Bungie Studios, Halo 2’s developers are understandably aghast at the thought of years of hard work being stolen, and the ‘Underground Army’ has been called into action to short circuit the spoilers. Perhaps Master Chief will also lend a hand.
Bungie
Microsoft games
Xbox
Buy Halo 2 on eBay US/UK
21 October, 2004
Sega Superstars 1st non-Sony use of EyeToy
Sega are launching a wide reaching, active and colourful campaign to trumpet in the arrival of Sega SuperStars, the first non-Sony game developed for the EyeToy. Available from October 22nd, the campaign will highlight the excitement and interactive nature of the game.
For those of you who may not know – and they’re might be some – the hugely innovative EyeToy is a camera that plugs into the PlayStation 2 and sits on top of the TV. An exercise in body mnemonics, it projects an image of the gamer onto the TV screen and tracks player’s movements, as they use different body parts to control characters, allowing the player to become an intrinsic part of the game.

“Eye Toy is not as well known as we would like it to be”, says Sega’s Tina Hicks as she elaborated on the military precision of the campaign. “We are targeting the games press and putting sig sheets in phone booths. A number of roadshows will be taking place at shopping centres across the UK, as well as in-store promotions from the 28th to the 30th of October.” Point-of-sale material will also be displayed throughout specialist gaming outlets and mainstream entertainment chains including Blockbuster and Gamestation.
Features have also been written in those pillars of modern teenage culture – Bliss, Sugar, Smash Hits, Top of the Pops, and TV Hits, so if you are too young to be frequenting the hairdressers, perhaps your Granny might do the necessary reading. This may be the case since the core target audience for the campaign is children aged between six and 14.
Sega SuperStars features 12 unique mini-games, each with one of the characters, offering 12 unique interactive experiences. It uses the in-game motion capture abilities of the EyeToy camera to allow gamers to transpose themselves into some of the most popular Sega characters — including Samba De Amigo, Sonic the Hedgehog, House of the Dead, and Virtua Fighter.
Sega SuperStars
20 October, 2004
Collapse-to-Zoom Could Aid Mobile Browsing
It’s the same old problem – a Web page is simply shrunk to fit a handheld screen and you waste time playing ‘blind man’s buff’ with the screen contents because you can’t tell the relevant from the irrelevant tiles.
Browsing large pictures, or simply navigating the Web on a mobile device is as unsatisfactory as trying to watch “The Return of the King” on a portable TV.
Opera have what they call Small-Screen Rendering technology to counter this but Patrick Baudisch and Xing Xie from Microsoft Research, Wei-Ying Ma from Microsoft Research Asia, and Chong Wang of Tsinghua University have provided a workaround to this limitation that will automate the scrolling and navigation of a large picture with a single pen stroke.
It’s called Collapse-to-zoom and offers an alternative exploration strategy. In addition to enabling users to zoom into relevant areas, Collapse-to-zoom allows users to collapse areas deemed irrelevant, such as archive material, or advertising. When you collapse the irrelevant content all remaining material expands to display more detail, thus increasing your chance of finding what you want. Collapse-to-zoom navigation, explain the researchers, is based on a hybrid between a marquee selection tool and a marking menu, that they’re naming “marquee menu”. There are four commands for collapsing content areas at different granularities and switching to a full-size view of what’s left on screen.
The system is controlled with pen gestures and are fully detailed in the Technology Review (linked below). Dragging the pen diagonally downwards from right to left collapses all page content in the rectangular area covered by the pen, and replaces it with a thin placeholder that can be restored by clicking if required. Dragging the pen diagonally upwards from left to right zooms that area into a 100-percent-scale reading mode and collapses everything around the area.
Baudisch, Xie, Ma and Wang will present their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2004) next week.
Microsoft Collapse To Zoom paper (PDF)
Technology Review article
Opera for Mobiles
20 October, 2004
Black Duck’s protexIP – Safer Open Source Code Usage
Open source can immediately prompt the words ‘law suit’ in some peoples’ minds, but Black Duck have introduced a software platform that helps developers catch and resolve potential intellectual property disputes.
A large software project may involve code and components from many sources – increasingly parts of a project may have open source origins. It’s highly likely that there will be some software on the computer that you’re using to read this now that will depend on open source components – and indeed the core of the internet depends on open source applications such as Apache.
Recently, some high profile conflicts between source code owners and developers has led to some very expensive and high profile legal challenges. The number of licenses, projects and obligations that a company needs to be aware of when looking to make a product that may involve open source code is immense – and checking and analysing what needs to be done, or what may happen if there is a conflict, is expensive and time-consuming.
Black Duck’s protexIP suite informs developers of code origins, license obligations and potential violations by producing a check list of items for them to resolve. Users can even run ‘whatif’ queries on code combinations.
The product is based around Black Duck’s 50gb knowledge base with information on more than 225 licenses. The company also uses spiders to monitor some 250 key open source projects to keep protexIP up to date.
“As open source and third party components proliferate and become nested in increasingly complex applications, the challenge of assuring compliance with licensing obligations becomes overwhelming without a comprehensive compliance platform,” said Karen Copenhaver, executive vice president and general counsel of Black Duck. “protexIP/license management empowers the lawyer’s oversight of the development process, from helping define and implement open source policy to approval of software release.”
Annual subscription packages start at US$9,500 (€7,595) for up to 2 seats. protexIP/license management customers must also subscribe to a protexIP/development package, which start at $12,500 (€9,993) for up to 5 seats.
protexIP
19 October, 2004
Eidos Delay Championship Manager 5
Computer games developer and publisher Eidos have announced another high-profile slippage to their schedule – Championship Manager 5 now looks like it may not appear before Christmas.
The game was due for release in October and industry analysts, shareholders and fans of the series expected great things from it in run up to Christmas. The long running delays behind Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, developed by Core Design and eventually released last year after months of rewrites, damaged the company considerably with many reviewers complaining that the game still has an unfinished feel to it.
The company have released a statement on their corporate site: “Eidos is continuing to work towards release of the PC version of the game shortly before Christmas, although this may extend into the New Year. As previously stated, the much anticipated XBox and PS2 versions of Championship Manager 5 remain firmly on track for release in Spring 2005 and the online version will be available through subscription shortly after the PC game’s release.”
Eidos are also looking for a buyer for the company, with EA, Microsoft and Sony amongst those who have expressed an interest. The company made a UK£2 million (€2.89 million) loss in the year to June 2004, compared to a UK£17 million (€24.56 million) profit during the previous year.
Eidos
18 October, 2004
Halo 2 Hit by Pirates
A version of Bungie’s new Halo 2 game has been leaked onto the internet, a month before the game is due for release. The game is set for launch on November 9th – and is one of the most eagerly awaited video games of all time.
The version in question is a PAL XBox edition, in French. In order to make use of the pirated copy, a downloader would have to make a DVD from an ISO file, and this would only work on a modified console. Also, I don’t fancy your chances at getting it to work with XBox Live. Given the size of the file and the sheer awkwardness involved in getting it to run, it’s dubious that the leak will affect sales of the game even minutely. However, theft and piracy are still offences and Bungie is not the first high-profile company to be the victim of this sort of crime: a section of Valve’s Half-Life 2 source code relating to Steam was stolen some months ago. It seems that the more demand there is for a title, the greater the impulse to rip it off – will this disruptive, and quite frankly boring, hacker hobby be inevitable for all future big-budget games? I sincerely hope not.
Microsoft issued a statement regarding the leak, asking for anyone with information to come forward.
“Microsoft has learned that a version of Halo 2 has been posted to various newsgroups and web sites. We consider downloading this code or making it available for others to download as theft. We are currently investigating the source of this leak with the appropriate authorities. Pending the result of our investigation, we do not have further comment. Microsoft takes the integrity of its intellectual property extremely seriously, and we are aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act. The launch of Halo 2 worldwide remains unaffected. We’re asking anyone with information on the source of this leak to contact Microsoft at 1-800-RULEGIT or send email to [email protected].”
Bungie
15 October, 2004
OS X on XP
Ah, the legally troubling world of emulation. MSX, a company based in Hawaii, have announced the release of their CherryOS – an application that allows the owner of any reasonably well-specified PC to turn it into a Macintosh G4, if they so choose.
The G4 is based on on IBM’s PowerPC architecture and as such is radically different from Intel’s x86 platform – so the host processor’s instruction set has to be translated from one platform to the other. Emulation effectively creates a virtual machine, in this case a G4, within the other computer’s operating system, in this case a PC. CherryOS emulates a G4 so well that all of the system’s hardware resources, an area where most emulators usually fall down, are accessible. Getting Firewire, USB, PCMCIA and Ethernet all to work well can’t have been easy.
Processor overheads and memory use are another traditional sticking point for emulators since the emulator has to be stored somewhere and instructions have to be translated, but MSX claim that CherryOS uses up only 20% of a host PC’s resources.
Users won’t be able to do much with their virtual G4 unless they install an operating system on it. MSX assure that OS X, available from Apple for about US$149 (€120), works fine.
Apple won’t be pleased: even if the product is 100% legal, didn’t reverse engineer any of their hardware or use any Apple code, it means users can now run Macintosh applications on hardware that is considerably cheaper (and less stylish) than their own kit.
Arben Kryeziu, CherryOS inventor says he created the application because he grew tired carrying a PC and mac around with him. “Think about it,” he said, “Now about 600 million PC users can have the Mac advantage. One computer to use all software and if PC users would use Mac software to get email, perhaps they would avoid viruses, Trojans and spy-ware.” True, but one could argue that about Linux, which is more popular than OS X. What else have you got?
He also went on to describe some of the advantages CherryOS brings: “You can build and test applications for a Mac on your development PC, test web site design for Mac web browsers without having to buy the hardware, run OS X, the world’s best operating system, on a less expensive hardware platform and use your favourite Mac apps on a PC.”
CherryOS
14 October, 2004
Microsoft Announces Plans for Your Digital Living Room and 22 New Security Flaws in Windows Products
Microsoft began the latest phase of its big push for consumers’ digital lives by unveiling Windows XP Media Centre Edition 2005 (MCE) and a host of products designed to work alongside it.
Bill G and Queen Latifah demonstrated the most recent features in MCE at an event in Los Angeles, highlighting integration with Windows Media Player 10 and a compatibility with a range of new hardware devices.
To coincide with the do, Microsoft’s main press release describes a hypothetical family and how they might use digital media across the day – from recording TV programmes via their web browser to broadcasting music around the home using a Media Centre Extender.
The company also announced 22 new security holes in its Windows range whilst issuing an update to address them. One of the new flaws managed to affect Macintosh OSX users.
By promoting MCE as a digital hub, the company hopes to show consumers that they can view, share and store their movies, music and pictures around the home and on the move. To reinforce their view of the future, the company also announced a number of devices from partners like HP, Dell and Creative Labs.
Music is a very important part of MS’s plans, with Windows Media 10 and MSN Music receiving another PR boost. Amongst the devices promoted by MS were new Digital Audio Receivers from Dlink, Roku and MoniFi which are designed to play digital music from a central source in any room of the house. Creative, Gateway, iRiver and other also announced new digital media players for the Christmas season, with capabilities ranging from simple music to full video playback.
Will Poole, senior vice president for the Windows Client division at Microsoft said in a statement: “For years, many in the consumer electronics industry have viewed digital entertainment as a field of dreams: if you provide consumers with a solution, they’ll build it into a larger experience – regardless of cost or complexity. Windows XP Media Centre PC and all of these other devices and services make it possible, for the first time, for the average consumer to enjoy digital entertainment anywhere, anytime and in any way.”
Microsoft’s Media experience
13 October, 2004
Vodafone Offers PC SMS Software
Vodafone are capitalising on the huge and frankly unexpected success of text messaging by giving away free PC software that allows users to send text messages from their computers.
Compatible with either Microsoft Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes, Vodafone Text Centre makes sending SMS messages as easy as sending an (expensive) email.
Although the software itself is free, sending a text message costs the usual amount (about UK£0.10, €0.15). Cleverly, replies can be directed to the senders phone, or to their Text Centre inbox. Other features include sending messages to multiple distribution lists and a calender function to send a text message to remind you of a meeting – if you somehow can’t remember to set either the calender in your phone or PDA.
Orange released a similar product recently, the PC Messenger. During testing at the office, we were disgusted to see that the test text we sent took 12 hours to arrive – not quite to what texting is about. Not surprisingly we haven’t used it again.
Every month, nimble-fingered mobile users send more than two billion grammar-free text messages in the UK. Indeed, texting accounted for 16% of Vodafone’s revenue in the last financial year, which must be startling profitable when you consider the service essentially costs next to nothing for the network operator to provide. By providing a PC client for texting, Vodafone is no doubt hoping to increase the market still further.
Vodafone Text Centre
13 October, 2004