So some updates on what’s coming up soon.

I’m hard at work on the new combustion-studios.com at the moment, which I expect will launch within a couple of weeks. It’s the centrepiece of a brand new identity for combustion.studios in an attempt to refocus our energy on some key projects.
A little preview of what’s to come in a recent draft of the new combustion studios splash video to open our applications…

Stay tuned to this blog for some previews of the new site, which is focused on being gorgeous, and offering huge improvements in product support, product information - and this blog will be significantly purtified too!

What’s next for combustion.studios?

It’s still early days for BBC Weatherbreak, and there’s a number of exciting last.fm tools on their way (I love the new last.fm layout btw - apparently because I want to be different. Thanks for that “Bring back the old last.fm”! :S)

But other than that, there is one major thing on the way for combustion.studios as a whole. More on that later….

So, today has been a bit of a busy day, with the release of the first public preview of BBC Weatherbreak. I think this is probably my most public test phase (and I don’t mean under that tenuous ‘beta’ tag that the world has adopted). This project has been my first with DirectX, XNA, .NET Framework, and has meant a lot of flirting with trying to ensure all of these are intact and up-to-date on the end-user’s machines.

The installer shipping with today’s release is not nearly stringent enough when it comes to verifying packages, which is causing a lot of headaches with random crashes, incomplete installations and so on.

Ultimately, this reflects badly on me, but I knew with a lot of unfamiliar deployment territory, the only way I could really explore the issues was by opening it up to every config known to man, finding out the common pitfalls, what errors aren’t being caught etc. If anything, the actual Weatherbreak experience is the least important part of this testing phase.

I do want to extend my deepest thanks to the guinea pigs who participated in a short internal alpha which picked up on a lot of issues that were sorted with the install experience, and I do hope you will give it a try, and let me know via the bug tracker if you encounter any issues.

More aesthetic work continues on BBC Weatherbreak, leading up to the first alpha release, with a more coherent UI starting to take shape to cap off the actual map experience, also there is some progress on the falling rain front (rather than relying entirely on surface puddles). A few random screenshots of how things are looking at the moment:



And some video of this build:

Isn’t it exciting…

Double news whammy today.

Work on BBC Weatherbreak is continuing very well - with the renderer now pretty much feature complete - with rain/cloud modelling, location and temperature beacons etc. There’s a lot of UX fit and finish going on now (including work on real-time versions of the spinning sphere device used to cap off TV forecasts). After that, there will be a beta release of a single data source version of the renderer. In slightly-less-boring-speak, that essentially means a version which will only show the current weather observations plotted, with various touring and other nonsense going on, rather than a complete forecast looking to the future, and extrapolating, interpolating and all that other work yet to be done. This release is to ensure that the renderer actually works on a wide range of configurations - as daft as it sounds, since most of the coding and debugging has been done on a graphically underpowered laptop, I’ve had a fairly good lowest-common-denominator vantage point. After getting some feedback from that, I’ll work on a more coherent set of data serverside to actually offer a lovely selection of weather forecasting goodness. Fun! So more on that later.

Now for retirement news, and today we see the official send-off for BBC Videobreak, which has been delivering video news to idle computers across the land for the last 14 months. However, you may be aware that the BBC News site has migrated to embedded Flash video, a much more welcome platform agnostic alternative to the WMP/Real joy we’ve had to choose between until now. As a result, however, the BBC’s video syndication options have been seriously nerfed. Obviously I’d pick superior video over syndication any day, so BBC Videobreak has been retired on account of its overnight redundancy
Let us spend a moment remembering it’s wonderful video-goodness, and move on…to pastures new.

Uni’s finished for the year- I need a project for the summer, and it takes the form of BBC Weatherbreak, my first foray into XNA/3D development.
BBC Weatherbreak emulates the BBC’s weather forecast graphics, by rendering them in real-time 3D on the user’s hardware. It uses current data downloaded from over 300 observation points around the UK, which is constantly analysed and extrapolated to illustrate cloud cover, rain, snow and other weather phenomena seen on TV.

This blog will feature ongoing updates on its development, but there’s no indication as to when it will be ready for release, yet.
Seven key milestones have been identified leading to final release, and today’s announcement coincides with the achievement of the first of these. Development is still early, but there is now a working renderer of the map, and the current build is able to make ‘tours’ of regions and nations, whether pre-scripted or dynamic:

Next up, time to add some actual, erm, weather…

last.fm recently furthered its attempts to open up and encourage developers to use its web services with the unveiling of build.last.fm - a gallery of sorts for developers to submit apps, both web and desktop-based.
This is good - especially with the promise of a whole new set of web services, which I for one, anxiously await.

I quickly submitted one of my apps - last.fm AMPtastes to build earlier in the week, and it’s (admittedly surprising) appearance on the gallery has spawned a bit of click-through here at CS. So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk briefly about other last.fm-based apps I’m currently working on.

The first is currently nameless, and takes the form of a Winamp plugin which will dynamically build playlists, by querying last.fm for a track similar to what’s currently playing, then enqueue it for when the current song is done. Sounds confusing, but if you’ve ever flirted with Linux media player favourite amaroK’s dynamic playlist, this aims to replicate much of its functionality. So far, the logical part of it is working, but it’s not actually a Winamp plugin per se, yet. It’s a nice big clunky app running alongside which starts the suggested song once the current one is near done. I’m currently tweaking its recommendation logic, then hope to rewrite it as a nicer, tighter app within Winamp’s SDK. Hopefully there will be some news soonish about this.

The other last.fm app is less completed. That is to say, it’s not really been started yet - it’s under the working title of laspere and is a screensaver which follows in the footsteps of an earlier release - last.fm live. The intention this time, however, is that it will be good. It involves lots of 3D carousels and other nonsense and will hopefully be just a lot of fun….yeah.

If you are still unfamiliar with all the fun last.fm AMPtastes has to offer, and you’re a (clever) Winamp user, you may wish to give it a little spin by clicking here! Do be warned, this is an early beta release going back a fair bit. It, for example, doesn’t do too well handling untagged (or half-tagged) files, or obscure characters (apologies J-Rock fans of the world). Again, this is due a bit of a rewrite, possibly having its functionality incorporated into the new Winamp playlistaliser I’m working on.

Let me know if you have any thoughts about last.fm apps you’d like to see, or any suggestions about what I’m working on at the moment.

PS. Yes I’m reviving this blog - it’s been far too dead during my start at uni. I’m a little better at balancing my dev work and uni now

Well, I’m moving tomorrow, to start uni, so I’ve decided to take a break from supporting all the existing combustion.studios software for my first year there. I might review my options later if I think I can keep up development.
To clarify, by support I’m talking about developing new software and releasing patches.

There are still two options left for technical support:

This has been an odd week.
A good odd, but an unlike me odd. It’s unsettling.
Why oh why is this week such a raging week of oddity?

I’ve actually managed to ship three products, built completely from scratch - codebase and assets, by myself, in five days. These are the three sitsim live releases - bid tv live, price-drop tv live, and speed auction tv live. I’ve only had a chance to put bid’s product page up, but the others are available to download. Oh, and on top of these three releases - I managed to push out a title update for one as well. Wacky.

So work has now well and truly begun on the real toughy - sitsim in all its simulating glory. Whilst developing the live range, I started to realise there would have been a real advantage to letting them share a lot of the codebase (instead of just duplicating it) and load in the appropriate assets and networking code, so as a follow-up sitsim will now be a single product instead of three disparate apps.
So, for the next while this blog will become a sort of development diary as I contend with sitsim. This will be the only place to get hold of screenies and videos of early builds, concept art, and perhaps even a chance to play with something pre-release…if that’s your thing. I’ll try keep updates roughly daily - I already have a few days of complaining saved up - don’t want to burn myself out!

Quite some time ago I produced a few ’simulators’ of bid-up.tv (now bid tv) and price-drop.tv (now price-drop tv) but they were later retired.
Some interest on the fansites for these channels (yes, they exist) trying to revive it themselves got me curious about looking into how I could maybe try to build these from scratch (especially since they’re now the exact same format) with some of what I wasn’t able to do before.
To do this, I’m currently working on a new engine designed to realistically simulate human behaviour for auctions and dutch auctions, and present it in an easily skinnable way. It’s called sitsim platform, and pretty soon you’ll be seeing it implemented in bid tv live and price-drop tv live - two screensavers which download current auction data from their respective websites and display them over real-time graphics and studio views. This will be followed by new versions of both simulators using the new proprietary algorithms which make sitsim.
Look out for more info…