Blog of Shaun McCran - Architecting robust, elegant technical and business solutions - XBox360

Microsoft brings Bing to the XBOX 360

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:16:00 -0000

Microsoft recently rolled out the newest iteration of the Xbox 360's Dashboard software platform. There are a slew of design tweaks and additional functionality, but the new addition I'm discussing here is Bing, Microsoft's answer to Google. [More]

Limited Star Wars Xbox 360 revealed

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 07:15:00 -0000

The first ever custom Xbox 360 and Kinect bundle includes an R2-D2 blue-and-white themed console, a custom Xbox 360 Wireless Controller inspired by C-3PO and the first ever white Kinect sensor. The bundle is available now for pre-order through participating retailers. Microsoft have also confirmed that this bundle will also be available in Europe. [More]

Things I saw at the Gadget show live - Gaming Exhibition area

Sun, 08 May 2011 20:01:00 -0000

One of the exhibition halls at this year's Gadget show live was set aside for gaming. This included the whole range of gaming from handheld consoles to high end PC and console gaming.

Nintendo had a great display of all of their handheld console throughout the ages, right up to the 3DS, which takes a little getting used to. [More]

Fable 3 review : post ending re think

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:47:00 -0000

When I first loaded up fable 3 I thought that it was a more accessible version of Fable 2. I was convinced that to try and reach a greater audience Lionhead had produced a dumbed down, easy to use for everyone, but un-engaging for actual gamers, experience.

I was wrong. The reason I've decided to write this Fable 3 article is because I've had a u-turn. I initially agreed with most of the game site reviews out there, but having played through it, I have a very different view. [More]

Lionhead studios launches GPS based fable 3 mobile App - Kingmaker

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:48:00 -0000

Lionhead studios have just launched 'Kingmaker', a mobile application that uses your GPS data to mark locations as 'owned' by you. You work on behalf of one of two teams, and receive gold coins to be spent within the game, every time you log a location in the application.

http://www.fable3kingmaker.com/Default.aspx

From a technology point of view this is an interesting example of many different platforms all converging to drive people towards pre ordering and buying a game.

The initial interaction is through several different mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows 7 mobile). Each GPS 'tagging' posts to social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the virtual gold is credit to your account. The account itself is an Xbox 360 account (windows live account), which will interface with the game, and you're in-game character ends out with the gold you have accrued.

It's an interesting proposition, and is trying to integrate several differing data platforms into one cohesive direction. It really is joined up thinking.

Streaming media to Xbox 360's and PS3's using Twonky Media Suite

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 22:17:00 -0000

I run a windows server 2003 pc at home, server 2003 is a great little web server that can handle multiple roles, including file storage. Unfortunately it is not Upnp (universal Plug and Play) so will not stream media directly to media players like Xbox 360 consoles, and the Playstation 3. The traditional (and recommended) solution to this is to stream the media through another more modern operating system that has upnp / dnla connections that reside in Windows Media player. This can restrict where you store files on a network, I for one do not want to store media on a desktop machine that I rebuild every 4-6 months. Another solution to this is to use a software application that acts as a translation layer. There are a few around, but the one I've been testing out recently is the Twonky Media Suite. It installs as a software service, and sits quietly in the background and serves up any media requests that hit it. It also appears on the network as a Upnp device, so it will be found by media players, and consoles. http://twonkymedia.com/products/twonkymanager/default.aspx Simply install the trial version, in the setup manager point to your media directories, and then fire up your media player. It will find it and allow you to browse through the different media types, completely bypassing the need for windows media center connections, or operating systems that are a little too old to know about Upnp or dnla.

Musings on the Red Dead Redemption ending

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:03:00 -0000

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm an avid gamer, I love gaming, I get properly involved in the story, the setting and the characters. The latest offering from Rockstar is a very fine example of modern storytelling, it is also a very good example of where the modern games industry is in comparison to the other major media channels (Books, film and TV). I've read a few negative reviews of the last section of this game, and having just finished it I thought I'd document my spin on it, be warned though, if you haven't finished Red Dead Redemption this article may spoil some elements of it for you. [More]

Xbox 360 Voice CFC released on RIAforge.org

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:11:00 -0000

Every time you turn on your Xbox 360 console and sign in with your Gamer profile your console records the data to an online server. www.360voice.com have written a service to consume the XML data. 360 Voice CFC http://360voice.riaforge.org is a Coldfusion based service layer that lets you consume the generated XML feeds from http://www.360voice.com. [More]

Xbox 360 Gamer Card App released on RIAforge.org

Sat, 29 May 2010 23:46:00 -0000

After Scotch on the Rocks in London I was struck with how many developers are also gamers. It seems there are a lot of us who build applications for people, then go home and relax in front of an Xbox 360 Console. With that in mind I thought I would wrap up a service I have used in the past. A site, http://www.mygamercard.net/ provides a service where you can generate a graphic of your Xbox 360 account. They call this a Gamer Card, and it is available in a few different formats. There is an example here You can download the project here: http://gamercard.riaforge.org/ [More]

Red 'Resident Evil 5' Xbox 360 unveiled!

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:55:00 -0000

Engadget have just put out a press release that there is a confirmed 'red' elite 360 being released! The controller looks like the previously limited edition USA red model. This red version is a limited edition Resident Evil 5 release. Full article here Makes me wonder if they are going to release a full green console, much like the green controllers here.

Consuming 360 Voices XML data feeds - 360 Voice part 2

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0000

www.360voice.com hosts a service where you can interrogate your GamerTag through an XML web feed. They host the service themselves, but also provide an API so that you can remotely call it, and use it however you want. So I thought I'd consume their service using ColdFusion, translate it, and display it here. Firstly I want to try and reduce the service overhead. So I will call the 360 voice service on the first instance of page initialisation, and then write the result to a file. The service only updates once a day, so I can safely assume that caching it daily isn't going to be too out of date. Firstly I've setup some global variables to set the file path location.

Then check for the existence of a file with todays date as the name. If the file exists, read it and use it, otherwise make a cfhttp call to the url, passing in any of the filtering url variables that the 360 voice API documents, in this case just my gamer tag.




	
	
	
		xmlfile = xmlparse(xmlfile);
		

	
		
		
	
	
		xmlfile = xmlparse(cfhttp.filecontent);

In the code above I am also using two cfhttpparams to deflate the return response from the service, as I was having issue with this in a compressed format. (Read more here). Now that we have the content and we've parsed it out into an XML object we need to search through and pick out the elements we want. First we write out the header details from the parent node of the xml document. Create an Array, and map the contents to the child node you want. In this case the "api.info" node. Doing this allows you to treat the previous XML object as a standard Array, so we can loop over it, and pick out the elements we want.




	
	 - 360 Voice.com Blog

Now we will do much the same thing with the blog contents, but using a different XML child Node for the Array.




	
		#arrEntries[i].title.XmlText# -#arrEntries[i].date.XmlText#

		#arrEntries[i].body.XmlText#

Again just loop through the Array, picking out the elements you want. Next I will add pagination, and possible look at some of the other data that 360 voice stores in its API, such as gamer badges etc.... but that's another article.

Xbox 360 Widget from Connor Middleton - powered by 360 voice

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:25:00 -0000

After joining 360 voice a few weeks back, and wandering through their blog history I found an article about Connor Middleton, a fellow Coldfusion developer. He has created a handy Xbox 360 widget, and a generator script so that you can generate your own! Its a flash application, so I'm guessing its flex, but when I get a free five minutes I'll generate one and see if I can figure out whats going on.
http://www.connormiddleton.com/gamercard/getYours.cfm I think I'll have a play around an compare it to the gamer tag widgets you can generate from http://card.mygamercard.net

CfHttp compression responses when calling a url - 360 Voice part 1

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:57:00 -0000

I was recently writing a service to consume an xml feed, and I stumbled upon an issue that I had previously not seen with the cfhttp tag. These days I would usually opt for a cfc call to a webservice, and consume it as a 'true' service object, but this is an old school http request, as I am reading asp page content. I setup the standard cfhttp code in coldfusion.

Unfortunately the http response was "Connection Failure". After investigating various potential authentication issues from both the destination server and the source server I had hit a wall. I fired up 'HTTP debugger' and had a scan of the http responses to see if anything stood out, and discovered that the http response was actually '200' which signifies everything is ok. So I was actually receiving a valid response. Maybe the problem was coldfusion. It transpires that if CF receives compressed or encrypted http responses you have to tell it what to do with them manually.

By adding these headers to the cfhttp you are requesting that the server return uncompressed responses, allowing coldfusion to handle the data returned. I ended out piecing this together from several different sources, but this site (http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2004/7/28/20040729) has a very good blog entry on this as well. So thanks Steven Erat, you helped a ton there! Complete code:

Now on to why I was actually writing this cfhttp request in the first place, http://www.360voice.com/, where you can hook up your XBox 360 to a web data feed. Like this.

Tomb raider for a tonne?

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:07:00 -0000

I noticed this the other day on ebay, seems a bit ambitious if you ask me! I suppose there is no harm in trying! Althought its only £20.00 on the highstreet......

Xbox 360 to get a new controller (Gross green!)

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:40:00 -0000

So I was sent a link to the new XBOX 360 controller this morning. Its supposed to have a more sensitive D pad, but that doesn't excuse it from being the most god awful green colour. Check out a full article at Gizmodo: http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/08/21/xbox_360_getting_new_controlle.html