The Ramblings of a Hazy Mind

So lately alongside the UI tutorial that I have been slowly churning out and making some hard decisions on I have also been throwing together a nice little tech demo using some soft body dynamics that I want to eventually use in a fast action fun XNA game possibly for later release on Xbox Live Arcade.

Assuming things on the Creator’s Club website go as expected, I would like to release the game (which isn’t even fully in the design stage yet) to the site and see what people think of it and hopefully push it all the way through the process out for public download from XBLA.

I’ll get some videos of the soft body stuff up as soon as I am happy with how all the physics behaviors are working out (hopefully soon).

All of the updates for the tutorials to the 3.0 version of the XNA Framework have been completed. I will be uploading and moving the projects in the svn to their appropriate locations and updating the PDF’s as well for the tutorial posts here on the blog.

If anyone finds any issues, please post them in the XNA Tutorials board of the forums: http://www.thehazymind.com/smf

The process of the conversion from XNA 2.0 to XNA 3.0 has offically begun. I have the CTP of XNA Game Studio 3.0 installed on my copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional and have started going through the tutorials and converting them over to the new version.

Much of the conversion process the last few version upgrades has been pretty simple, with just a few call changes here and there to some of the XNA interfaces, but this time around, I will also be changing quite a bit of the actual engine code as well to better accomodate changes that I have come to make in my private version of the engine.

Some of the suggestions from the forums have been taken into account in the new version of the tutorials as well, so expect to see a lot of improvements (even if they are small ones) in many places in the code. Since XNA 3.0 isn’t officially out yet, I won’t be updating the PDF files on the site here until the full public release, but I will be checking all of the updated tutorials into the svn in the branches/XNA 3.0 folder. They will be moved into the regular tutorial tags spots upon the public release of the new version of XNA.

As a little extra side project (or add-on hardware interface?) to the HMEngine I have decided to put together a table top multitouch piece of hardware. Currently I am working with cheap or free materials and building a prototype at home.

At the moment, I have modified a freebie webcam to work as an IR-only camera using exposed film as my IR pass filter and removing the simple glass IR filter the camera originally had. Also, I am using a $6 piece of glass and a peep hole door viewer from Lowe’s to give the crappy camera a better view angle. The table I am building is circular, and the door viewer causes a large amount of distortion in the images being returned, so I will need to use the HMEngine to do a little preprocessing on the images before sending them on to the touch library TouchLib that will handle the multitouch input detection parts.

Hopefully the project will continue to go as well as it has so far (having only spent about $16 so far) and I will be able to post pictures or maybe even a video soon of the working prototype table. I’ll keep updates coming as they happen.

So a lot has been happening lately. I graduated (at least they haven’t yet told me that I missed some tiny obscure requirements yet.

I have been spending a lot of time lately making sure the new version of XNA coming out in a little while here is fully compatible with the current tutorials and updating the architecture of some of those tutorials a bit as well to reflect some speedup changes that have occurred in my own local copy of the engine’s code.

On top of all of that I have also been working diligently on a good GUI tutorial to try and get some nice menu systems and some in game hud and controls implemented as well. I’ll keep posting updates on that front as it continues.

Lastly, I just hired on as a full time employee at my first real job, which is actually just a continuation of the contract work i have been doing for the last year and a half. The company is a tech startup that offers online management software at a very low price point for foundations and scholarship organizations. We are doing fairly well so far, and hopefully that continues.

That’s all for now. More updates to come as I get more work done on the tutorials. Maybe even some screen shots

Well, I went back through an old archive and a backup of the website from a while ago and got back as much of the original content as I could from those and got it all back on here where it belongs.

I’ll have to be a little more frequent with my backups from now on I guess

• Malts
• Color (Lovibond)
• Amount (lbs)
• Great Western 6-row Domestic Malt
• 1.8
• 6
• Crystal
• 60
• 1
• Crystal
• 120
• 1
• Dextrin (Carapils)
• 1.5
• 0.5
• Hops
• Alpha %
• Amount (oz)
• Amarillo
• 8.5
• 4
• Yeast
• California Ale Yeast WLP #001 (Pitchable Liquid)

• Malts
• Color (Lovibond)
• Amount (lbs)
• Muntons 2-row Lager Malt
• 2.4
• 2
• Weyermann Bamberg Pilsner Malt
• 10
• Hops
• Alpha %
• Amount (oz)
• Domestic Hallertauer Loose Raw Hops
• 4.75
• 4
• Tettnanger Loose Raw Hops
• 4.00
• 4
• Yeast
• German Lager Yeast #WLP 830 (Pitchable Liquid)

Procedure

• Bring 14 liters of water 130° F
• Add crushed malted barley and hold at 120° F for 15 min.
• Add boiling water to raise to 145° F and hold for 35 min.
• Raise to 160° F and hold for 30 min.
• Finally raise temperature to 170° F to stop conversion.
• Sparge to 28 liters or until the brew pot is full, bring to a boil
• Add Hallertauer (bittering) Hops and boil for 40 minutes
• Add 2 oz Tettnanger (flavor) Hops and boil for 10 minutes
• Add 2 oz Tettnanger (aroma) Hops and boil for 10 minutes
• Cool to 70° F, pitch yeast, pour into primary fermenters (this batch was a 10 gallon batch)
• Once fermentation begins, keep fermenter at 55° F for 2 weeks
• Rack into secondary fermenters and keep for 1 week at 55° F
• Bottle or Keg (with appropriate priming sugar added) and condition for 1 week
• Drink your Homebrew!

• Malts
• Color (Lovibond)
• Amount (lbs)
• Muntons Light 2-Row Malt
• 8
• Caramel Malt
• 80
• 1
• Munich Malt
• 0.5
• Victory Malt
• 25
• 0.5
• Adjuncts
• Specs.
• Amount (oz)
• Roasted Barley
• crushed
• 2
• Hops
• Alpha %
• Amount (oz)
• U.K. Kent Goldings
• 4.75
• 2
• U.K. Fuggles
• 4.75
• 1
• Yeast
• Irish Ale Yeast WLP #004 (Pitchable Liquid)

Procedure

• Boil uncrushed caramel malt in 2 liters of water for 15 minutes.
• Strain to about 1 liter of thick ‘malt soup’
• Bring ‘malt soup’ all other malts and 9 liters of water to 140° F
• Hold at 140° F for 30 min.
• Add 4 liters of boiling water to bring temperature to 155-158&deg F and hold 30 min.
• Sparge to 28 liters or until the brew pot is full, bring to a boil
• Add U.K. Kent Golding (bittering) Hops and boil for 60 minutes
• Add 0.5 oz Fuggle (flavor) Hops and boil for 10 minutes
• Add 0.5 oz Fuggle (aroma) Hops and boil for 5 minutes
• Cool to 70° F, pitch yeast, pour into primary fermenter (should have about 21 liters)
• Once fermentation begins, keep fermenter at 70° F for 2 weeks
• Rack into secondary fermenter and keep for 2 weeks at 70° F (should have at least 19 liters)
• Bottle or Keg (with appropriate priming sugar added) and condition for 1-2 weeks
• Drink your Homebrew!

• Malts
• Color (Lovibond)
• Amount (lbs)
• Great Western 6-row Domestic Malt
• 1.8
• 7
• Adjuncts
• Specs.
• Amount (oz)
• Flaked Wheat
• flaked
• 16
• Raw Huckleberries
• pressed
• 32
• Hops
• Alpha %
• Amount (oz)
• Domestic Hallertauer Loose Raw Hops
• 4.75
• 4
• Domesitc Simcoe Loose Raw Hops
• 13.3
• 2
• Yeast
• American Hefeweizen #WLP 320 (Pitchable Liquid)

Procedure

• Bring 16 liters of water with 1/2 tsp. Gypsum to 145° F
• Add crushed malted barley and hold at 135° F for 30 min.
• Add 7.1 liters of boiling water with 1/2 tsp. Gypsum
• Hold at 155° F for 45 min. then raise to 158° F for 15 min.
• Sparge to 28 liters or until the brew pot is full, bring to a boil
• Add Hallertauer (bittering) Hops and boil for 58 minutes
• Add Simcoe (flavor/aroma) Hops and boil for 2 minutes
• Cool to 70° F, pitch yeast, pour into primary fermenter (should have about 21 liters)
• Once fermentation begins, keep fermenter at 55° F for 2 weeks
• Rack into secondary fermenter with berries and keep for 2 weeks at 55° F (should have at least 19 liters)
• Bottle or Keg (with appropriate priming sugar added) and condition for 1-2 weeks
• Drink your Homebrew!