With Zetty and I heading off next for South Africa next Tuesday and the Chimp and Rabbits wedding this weekend, It’s comming crunch time for Eraser.

To test what machines it’s going to run on I’ve packaged up a 1 level beta test for you all.

Unforunately due to the fact that XNA is right on the bleeding edge you’ve got to install a few updates and have a shader compatable video card to be able to play.

• Game (3.5Mb)

• DirectX Web Updater (you will need even if you already have directX [you need the October patch]) 
• XNA Runtime (2.0Mb)
• .NET 2.0 Runtime (22.4Mb)

Let me know how you go?

  Last Friday arvo the IT department had it’s little xmas do, this year it was 9 holes of golf at the local golf coarse complete with buggies and eskies.

Chicken and I being the wankas we are extended it into gay dressups golf just for shits and giggles.  Certainly didn’t help my shots at all, then again that could have been the “can per hole” average I set for myself.

Mike took over Vijay’s usual position as the paparatzi for the event, taking these pearler shots.

Somehow we managed to win the day without cheating, much to the dismay of Paul and his team (he’s the only one who actually plays golf), there was one putt that was like a snooker shot where one ball hit another sending it in, but thats allowed in golf isn’t it?

It’s been a little quiet around here again, the following images are of the little game comp project that Euan and I are collaborating on that has been occupying all of my spare time, that and a 12 hour mountain bike race, fishing in San Reamo, getting ready for Trav and Jess’s wedding (mostly the impending bucks weekend) and our trip away in December.

If you think it looks like it’s hand drawn on graph paper rather than a computer game then I’m some way towards getting the look right, that’s right I’m using all the graphics processing power of a modern GPU with pixel shaders to render in realtime maths book doodles attacking an eraser which is in turn spewing out an array of red pen drawn death.

Why, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been done before?

Here’s a link to the comp entry thread, I’m keeping it on the down low (I don’t actually say if they’re screen shots or concept sketches) to see if I can generate some intrigue, no doubt someone will find this blog entry and my cover will be blown, oh well it’s worth a shot.

I’m sure most of you are as sick as I am of XP’s gordy friggin Blue bubbly sh!te default theme, unfortunately the alternative options they give you are equally as shizen if not a little worse.

I have never understood why they would highlight the border of an application so much when 99.99999% of the time you’re concerned about what’s in side the border!

Finally some reprieve, the Mabster sent this Zune XP theme to me this morning, it’s an official theme from Microsoft that renders your window boarder in glorious non-imposing BLACK.

I’ve been running today and apart from the selected item colour not being a colour (it defaults to gray but you can change it) it’s rather nice, still not a pinch on Apples Aqua interface but makes XP more bearable.

Download it and give it a go ZuneDesktopTheme.msi (1.6Mb)