A new wee game for you to try, fresh off the export button today.  It’s for the Falkirk Wheel, promoting their Christmas programme and winter sale.  And it’s called Penguin Knockout…

For the game concept I took inspiration from the Falkirk Wheel itself.  I’ve always been impressed by the fact it can raise or lower a boat over 24 meters using an electric motor that produces just 30 horsepower… or about 1/5th of the average family car!   Or to put it another way, it costs less than 20p in electricity to do a full rotation.  

It does this energy-saving miracle by exactly balancing each of the water tanks before it rotates.  I used this principal to come up with the Christmas game concept — which is basically all just a good excuse to hit penguins in the face with snowballs!  

The game features a first for my freelance work, SMS e-vouchers.  When you submit your score you have the option to enter your mobile number.  The system then instantly send you a discount e-voucher for use at the Falkirk Wheel.  

Have a play and let me know what you think.

I’ve been running a free Sudoku game for a couple of years at www.grantgibson.co.uk/sudoku.  It’s available to play in desktop and mobile formats as well as on widget sites like Netvibes.com. 

The Flash part is really my area of expertise, but I also had to hack together a PHP script to generate the puzzles.  I found a script that does the right sort of thing, and modified it to output in my required format.  However, over the years I’ve had a few people complain that it produces puzzles with multiple solutions (and then only accepts one of those solutions as the ‘correct’ answer).

I don’t know enough mathematics or PHP to correct the problem, so I’m putting out an appeal.  If anyone wants to have a go at correcting the problem — or rewriting the script — please do so.  You’ll be helping me and thousands of other Sudoku fans around the world.

Requirements

Input parameters (via GET URL):

• Difficulty [currently 1, 2 or 3, but can be tweaked if necessary]
• Random [currently a six digit integer, but can be tweaked if necessary]

Output format (plain text):

puzzle=<TITLE>
Daily Random Sudoku: Medium
<AUTHOR>
Your Name Here
<COPYRIGHT>
Your Name Here and Grant Gibson
<DIFFICULTY>
2
<GRID>
.ooo..o..
o.o..oooo
o.o…ooo
o.o..oooo
oo.ooo.oo
oooo..o.o
ooo…o.o
oooo..o.o
..o..ooo.
<ANSWER>
528631974
163974285
497285631
235716849
671849352
984352716
859123467
312467598
746598123

… where answer is the unique grid solution, and grid represents the intial state of the puzzle – dot for blank, o for a displayed number.

I’ve attached the Current Grid Script here.  If you’d like to suggest any revisions, or post up an alternative version of the code please do so — either as a comment here, or directly to me by email.  See my contact page for email details.

Thanks, and good luck!

For the past few months I’ve been working on IT exhibits for Glasgow Science Centre.  What started out as a commission for two interactive exhibits turned into a project involving five exhibits.  These ranged from relatively simple touch-screen video interactives to full-blown games and dual-screen applications. A few highlights…

News Editor

This exhibit allows visitors to edit their own news story, selecting video clips, applying blue-screen effects, applying captions and music to produce a news piece suitable for broadcast.  Once complete, visitors can re-play their entire package as it would be shown on TV, complete with titles and credits.

The tricky part here was getting Flash to seamlessly stream one clip after the other with no buffering delay.  Other people had abandoned Flash in the past for its limitations in handling frame-accurate video playback.  For this project I had to develop some Actionscript routines that guaranteed seamless playback and syncronisation of title overlays.

You Vote

This one features a touch-screen interface, webcam and large projection screen.  Visitors are allowed to vote on the topic of the day, then have their head ‘beamed’ onto a cartoon body of their choice on the projection screen. 

I knew before I started that the difficulty would be in syncronising content between the two screens – one a 19″ touch-screen, the other a 6ft projector display. A solution was developed using specific graphics cards, a load of Actionscript and advanced configuration of the touch-screen software.

Organ Transplant

Organ Transplant was the last exhibit we developed and is probably the most popular of them all.  It’s so popular that Glasgow Science Centre had to install a second terminal beside the first to meet demand.  The high score table, controlled by an on-screen keyboard, has made things highly competitive — the current high score is 540, more than double my highest score!

There’s a few higher res photos of my exhibits here.

If you go to Glasgow Science Centre, please take a look and let me know what you think.

I’ve just finished another online game for Glasgow Science Centre.  The Bang or No Bang live show explores the science of risk though a series of demonstrations based on popular game shows.

GSC commissioned me to develop an online Flash game to allow web visitors to experience one of the demonstrations from the show.  The game displays probabilities through a ‘luck-o-meter’ gauge – a tongue-in-cheek reference, as the show clearly demonstrates “there’s no such thing as luck”.

You can play it online here: Bang or No Bang game.

Just a quick post to clear up any confusion on the ReadyBoost compatibility list.  It turns out that devices which don’t quite meet the Vista storage spec may still show up as ‘compatible’ in Windows Vista (and in this list). 

Dave Pryce emailed to point out that the minimum spec for ReadyBoost is 2.5MB/s read & 1.75 MB/s write, while Microsoft’s ReadyBoost usage guidelines say that for a device to be listed as Enhanced for ReadyBoost it must do around double that – 5MB/s read & 3MB/s write (based on 4k random reads and 512k random writes).

You probably already know that not all Flash devices are created equal, but it’s interesting to also note that devices that don’t quite meet the spec are still deemed compatible in Vista. My recommendation is to look for read/write rates wherever they’re quoted in the ReadyBoost chart – a faster device should result in a more noticeable performance gain.

The ReadyBoost device list is still growing – 364 devices tested so far, 59% of which have worked with Vista ReadyBoost.

Kingston have fared better than average with two thirds of tested devices working successfully.  My own DataTraveler Elite has been running a ReadyBoost cache flawlessly for several months now.

A few days ago I received an email from Ron Bartle who pointed out the inconsistency in reports for the DataTraveler range.  Some users had success with the DataTraveler 1 and U3 devices whilst others had received failure notices for the same drives, even those with identical capacities. 

I contacted Kingston to see if they could shed any light on why that might be.  Their reply doesn’t answer that question directly, but points out that there’s only one Kingston device that is officially ReadyBoost compatible: 

So far there is only one Kingston DataTraveler which is officially compatible with Readyboost which is our DTS.

The reply went on to say that more new ReadyBoost compatible devices are on the way, and that the rest of their existing product line is still in testing for ReadyBoost compatibility. 

So for now it seems the safe option is to go for the DTS.  If you’re feeling brave you could try the DataTraveler Elite – it’s not officially compatible, but it’s the one I’m using as I write this and it’s had no negative reports so far… and it’s around 30% cheaper than the DTS.