October 2007 – Page 6 – Kev's Development Toolbox

October 13, 2007

Incredible demo download sizes on PS3 (equivalent to 119 days of load time for a ZX Spectrum…)

The Ratchet and Clank downloadable demo on the PS3 store this week was 1609MB. Not a big deal for todays broadband connections, but think back just a few years ago and it would have been unheard of to attempt to download such a large file from the Internet, plus to think that a ‘demo’ is over 1.5GB. Here’s a few stats to put that in perspective – 1609MB would be:

2.3 700MB CDs
1117 1.44M floppies
2288 720k floppies
4576 360k floppies
160 times larger than the 10MB hard disk in an IBM PC XT
2,860 hours (119 days) of load time from a cassette for a 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (assuming 5 minutes per 48k)

In more recent terms though, this is only:

0.19 of a 8.5GB dual-layer DVD
0.032 of a 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray disk

… kind of puts things in perspective.

October 10, 2007

TiVo on Comcast behind schedule

I’ve been following the eventual rollout of TiVo to Comcast users recently since we’ve been stuck with a DirecTivo box for a number of years now and I’m looking for an HD upgrade path. I say ‘stuck’ loosely, since we love TiVo. TiVo is awesome – there is no going back, and nothing else will do. The problem with the DirecTV Tivo box is that we can’t upgrade to DirecTV’s HD service because we’d lose our TiVo box (with paidup lifetime subscription – we’ve had free service for something like 5+ years now) since DirecTV broke their relationship with TiVo sometime back, and their own ‘homegrown’ DVR is just not any good in comparision with TiVo, according to existing owners.

So moving to Comcast is one option open, and I think even now it would be possible to buy a standalone HD TiVo unit and use it in conjunction with a Comcast cable box, or wait until they get the integrated boxes available.

October 9, 2007

Basic 2d game engine with sprite collision detection

I’ve spent a few hours playing around with the Java2D api over the weekend, and with the tutorial on this site, I’ve got a basic framework for implementing a simple 2D game. So far I’ve got a keyboard handler to control the player’s movement and collision detection against solid objects. You can move the player character around the screen and with solid objects (tiles) on the screen it wouldn’t be too far from this point to implement a simple maze or platform game.

At this point this is probably more than I need since I was thinking of implementing a version of one of the original Game & Watch games as a starting point. I’ll keep you posted on how I progress and at some point I’ll also post the source.

October 9, 2007

Articles and tutorials for learning JavaFX

If you’ve been thinking of getting into JavaFX, Sun’s Java answer to Flash, Sun has a number of articles and tutorials on the java.sun.com site, starting with this intro article. Look on the far right for a list of other follow on articles.