James Wynn

Recently the local Fox affiliat approached me about helping with an article about the new game controllers that use mind control.  The device we reviewed is the Neural Impulse Actuator or NIA by OCZ Technology.  It works by sensing the electrical signals given off by your brain and facial muscles.  Its a fantastic piece of technology, though rough around the corners, and I think in another couple of years we may see wide spread use of such devices.

Cool though they may be, I don't see technology like this replacing current mainstays like the joystick and keyboard/mouse. More likely, they will fall into the "add on" category like the gaming keypads and 6 button mice. 

That said, it is truely a piece of interesting technology and I look forward to playing with them in the future.

A friend sent me a link to what is easily one of the coolest game ideas I've seen in a long time.  You can always count on the IGF winners to show you something new and fun.  Last year's IGF Grand Prize Winner was a little game called Crayon Physics.  All the graphics are rendered in a very hand-drawn crayon style, and the game play is driven entirely by drawing similar crayon images.  It's a puzzle game where you must move a little red ball to catch a star, but the only tools you have are those which you've drawn.  Check it out.

Not that its news, but XNA along with a membership to the XNA Creators Club allows developers to create games in a unified system for both Windows and XBox 360. Although XNA uses C#, which I personally had reservations against, it is actually quite easy to develop on and even fun to use. XNA has now abated these reservations about C# and has persuaded me to try to port my project to the 360.

With sound, networking, a solid widely used gamepad interface, and excellent graphics capabilities the XNA platform seems ideal for small games development. The only reservations still present are against the relative immaturity of the community (as opposed to Ogre's which is superb) and the lack of distribution mechanisms. The distribution problem is slated to be resolved with a rating system within the developer community, but this just comes back to the other problem.

There is, still, a significant amount of community generated content for learning and using XNA, but I worry about the platform if it does not attract a higher concentration of mature developers. We shall see.

The Feb '05 edition of Game Developer Magazine had an article titled "Late-Binding Data" and described an extremely useful mechanism for automatically reloading data into a game engine dynamically when the data has been changed.  It detects when a file has been updated and repopulates the data throughout the system.  So, an image/model can be exported from some other program and the results will be immediately visible in the game. No reloading!

This sounds like a huge time saver in the long run, but right now its turning into a significant time sink.  I figure if this functionality would be useful in my personal project, it would likely be valuable to others as well, so I'm going to try to integrate it into Ogre.  Should also prove a useful exercise in using Ogre as well.