August 2007 - Posts
In a previous post I originally announced that two South African bands were in the top rated tracks list in the Xbox Soundtracks competition run by Microsoft and Universal Music. Today it was announced in a press release that the local Johannesburg based band MadLove had been crowned as the South Africa winner for the Xbox Soundtracks competition.
MadLove’s Angel’s Fall track for Tomb Raider was ranked as the best track by visitors to the contest site. For the past month thousands of musicians and gamers alike from across Europe have been creating new music tracks inspired by the latest high-definition games on the Xbox 360. From the colourful fantasy of Viva Piñata to the gritty battles of Halo 3, DJs, bands and composers have created tracks cut to a wide range of latest Xbox 360 titles. Gaming and music fans alike then logged on to view and rate the entries, with MadLove emerging as the winner.
“We’re ecstatic!!!!! It’s the greatest news we’ve ever received. We pray that this result opens doors for us to get our music out to the world, said Shahir Chundra, lead singer of MadLove. “Thank you so much XBOX and especially everyone around the world who voted for us!!!”
Jozi based MadLove has high aspirations both locally and internationally. Made aware of the Soundtracks initiative through a press article, MadLove was immediately inspired to get involved. “Once we had watched all of the trailers it was clear that Tomb Raider was the only choice for Angel’s Fall”, said Shahir.
In recognition, MadLove will get to visit a local Universal Music studio in Johannesburg to record their tune with the help of top producers and engineers. In addition to this, they will also get an Xbox 360 console and a T9 Samsung mp3 player.
Congratulations to all that submitted entries as I believe you are all winners. MadLove's winning entry is available online here.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
I was saddened to open my feed reader this morning. A local developer and Windows Media Center enthusiast, Colin Savage, who was the man behind the ZaEpg service has been legally forced to cease and desist by the South African television monopoly known as MultiChoice.
Yes everyone that is running a HTPC (Home Theatre PC) like Windows Media Center will soon have no more DStv Electronic Program Guide (EPG). It would be great if MultiChoice actually offered their guide information electronically other than over-the-air - I'm sure the 1400 odd users would be more than willing to pay a nominal fee for access to this information - however MultiChoice seem so narrow-minded in this regard. Its not like they are not using a DStv decoder already, they just don't want to use the decoder for anything more than a channel changer.
A while back I blogged about MultiChoice's attitude toward IPTV and after a little chat with their head of strategy at MultiChoice, Jonathan Newman, I understand that MultiChoice believes their product the MultiChoice PVR decoder is more important to them than the people paying to be subscribers to their bouquet.
Personally I can't wait for the Telkom Media IPTV solution to roll-out next year August on the Microsoft Mediaroom platform with the Xbox 360 as a capable IPTV set-top box.
What are your feelings on this? Can we let a monopoly squash the HTPC market in South Africa?
Yesterday at the XNA Gamerfest 2007 Microsoft announced XNA Game Studio 2.0, an upgrade for the current XNA Game Studio Express 1.0 Refresh, which will now integrate into all Visual Studio SKUs not just the C# Express edition.
For those that don't know, XNA Game Studio Express is a free product from Microsoft that plugs into Visual Studio 2005 C# Express Edition and enables developers to build games for both the Windows and Xbox 360 platforms. This is all made possible with the XNA Framework 1.0 which is a derivative of the .NET Compact Framework adding DirectX capabilities.
According to the product announcement, XNA Game Studio 2.0 will feature user interface improvements, new project templates and improvements to the content processing. Personally I believe the best improvement will be the ability to use Visual Studio Professional and have my standard IDE plug-ins available again.
Changes to the XNA Framework include new networking APIs with support for Xbox LIVE, graphic rendering improvements and nested components. Unfortunately there seems to be no comment on when the new version is going to ship and whether it will remain a free product.
Is anyone in the local (South African) industry working with XNA for either hobbyist or commercial game development?
Technorati tags:
XNA,
gamingCross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
Microsoft is definitely on a roll with releasing CTPs and betas lately. The latest drop of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download and I'm extremely happy to see that there is now new data types for representing date and time separately with support for time zone information. How extensive the time zone support will be remains to be seen.
Another addition to the July CTP is table valued parameters. In theory you will be able to now be able to have stored procedures that accept multiple rows of data as a parameter. So think how easy it will be now to save an order and the order details to a database with one stored procedure call. Less round-trip in my opinion means decreased lock durations.
For the last couple of years my day job has had me working with spatial data from location based services through to vehicle tracking, optimization and fleet management. We've tended to stay clear of the big names in GIS databases and have favoured open source and in-house implementations. Its great to see that Katamai (aka SQL Server 2008) will feature spatial support out of the box. I hope its included in the July CTP.
You can check out the new features here and download the goodness from here.
Source: SQL Server 2008 July CTP
Technorati tags:
SQL Server 2008
I haven't even had Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 for more than a day and I've found a compiler bug already. My Compact Framework 2.0 project compiled just fine under Visual Studio 2005 against the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 (build 2.0.6129.0) and it even worked using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 against the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Beta 1 (build 3.5.7066.0). So I was quite surprised when I got the following compilation error against the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Beta 2 (build 3.5.7121.0):
error CS0656 "Missing compiler required member 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.UnsafeValueTypeAttribute..ctor'"
As there was no code reference with the numerous instances of the error it took me a few minutes to go through my code and find the likely unsafe code. After a few test cases I isolated it to a structure which defines a fixed size array for a P/Invoke call to a Windows CE API function.
public unsafe struct UnsafeStruct
{
public fixed int Bar[2];
}
I've logged the bug on Microsoft Connect and would appreciate if others can validate the issue and vote by rating it so that the product team does something to fix it.