Before I go on I feel I should explain my situation with handsets. I owned an iPhone 3G, then an iPhone 4 and then a Nexus One. I am currently looking to acquire a Lumia 800 and to try out Windows Phone 7. So whilst I am not 100% experienced with all three big contenders, I am familiar with two out of three, and I’m fairly confident in my understanding on WP7 and its purpose on the market.

Android was bought by Google in 2005. Two years before iOS (or as it was known then simply iPhone OS) was even demonstrated to the public. However it existed in a completely different skin than it did when it launched on the T-Mobile G1 in 2008. Its purpose remained the same throughout its transition into Google’s hands though. Create an open source, reliable operating system that could be utilised by a whole range of developers from the big corporate handset manufacturers to the small indie custom rom developers. From this point of view, the OS was a complete success. There are a wide number of handsets available from several manufacturers such as Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, ZTE and more. All of these have complete free reign over what the OS does and doesn’t do (more on this later). On top of that there are several indie developers who distribute their own custom built flavour of Android. Most notably of these is Cyanogen with  his aptly named Cyanogenmod. Him and his team also have complete control over their version of the OS. However whilst it sounds really great from a developer perspective, from a user perspective this freedom and openness has created the fragmented nightmare. Many Android evangelists and enthusiasts would scoff at the term “fragmentation”, casting aside the accusation with cries of bias on my part and they’d be partly correct. They’d be correct that I was biased, but what they’d fail to have pinpointed is that the bias has developed over several months of owning one handset which works absolutely perfectly vs another handset which is riddled with inconsistencies.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy using my Nexus One. It’s a great device, I could not however recommend it to anyone. Due mostly to the hardware being sub-par in comparison the iPhone. The build of the phones case is completely solid but the one thing that it lacks in is the touch screen. Which is a very important part of the phone, however on the N1 it just feels less accurate to use. Digression aside, it highlights part one of the problem with android. Hardware can be vastly different between devices. This means that for the end user they’re never guaranteed the same user experience between two different handset model. One might have a more accurate touch screen, the other a less accurate but slightly larger screen. Android has to accommodate for all of those devices and create a one size fits all UI that in the end just feels like it would benefit from a clear defined minimum specification requirement (more on this later with WP7).

Secondly is what I feel the biggest problem with Android. This was touched upon earlier but it stands out to me as a problem. The fact that anyone can do anything with their specific Android distribution. Perhaps some clarity for highlighting this as a problem. Whilst I see software freedom as being a great and important part of our developing computing world I feel that there’s a time and a place for it. This could work for Android if it weren’t for the real problem behind this, the way Google markets the OS. From day one Google has marketed Android the same way Apple has marketed iOS. By introducing new revisions of the core Android OS at large invite only press events so that all the new features can be spread across the web as quickly as possible. The difference is that when Apple demonstrates new features they clearly state who will get them for which devices and when. Google does none of this, because it is not up to them. They leave it up to the manufacturers to work these features into their new handsets or as updates for select older devices. However these manufacturers are clearly not informed ahead of the public as they often flounder to release vague and un-informing statements days after the announcement of a new version. Things should really change if Android is going to carry on. Either Google takes control and ensures that devices that mean a minimum specification requirement are guaranteed an update to the newest version distributed by themselves or they stop marketing Android the same way iOS is marketed. Let manufacturers market their own modification of Android as their own OS e.g. market HTC Sense/MotoBlur/TouchWiz as the OS, not Android. That way there is a clear distinction between what is and isn’t managed by Google and would also clear up a lot of the confusion on the consumer end. It wouldn’t solve the fragmentation problem but it would solve the “who do I ask about the Ice Cream Sandwich update for my HTC phone from 2009” problem.

Simplifying that last paragraph comes down to “Google: either take more control or back off completely, stop sitting on the fence where everyone can aim their tomatoes at you more easily.”

Of course, if they took more control today they’d look something not dissimilar to Windows Phone. I feel Microsoft has a good approach here, one that should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about the desktop Windows. They set a minimum hardware specification that everyone must meet before they can sell their product with Microsoft software and no one is allowed to change any of the code of the OS. (Sure they can add junk-ware on top of the OS but that’s a rant for a different day). This method at least guarantees a consistent experience between handsets and in my opinion user experience is absolutely crucial to the these new post-PC devices. If I buy a new phone I want to be able to come home and within the first hour have all my contacts, music, podcasts and more synced up to the device and ready to go. Whilst I’ve yet to try this with Windows Phone for myself, I know I can do that very easily on iOS and not at all within the first hour on Android. I feel the lack of focus on Google’s part is to blame, which I could forgive them for if they backed out of the spotlight and admitted they’re allowing their partners to develop the user experience.

Since so many people helped me along the path I feel it’s only polite to inform people of the result of that search. On this coming Monday, I will begin my new position as an Engineer at Outplay Entertainment.

This is a big deal for me and I am extremely excited by this position. Outplay are proving themselves to be an up and coming force to be reckoned with in the mobile space and the chance to make my mark on such a fantastic company is what drove me into game development in the first place. I’m hoping the job will present significant challenges that I can overcome to prove myself as a skilled programmer. All the while doing so on new and exciting platforms.

The personal project will unfortunately be getting back benched for now, however it’s not going away. Just hibernating.

I’m not going anywhere though, I’m back in Dundee now and will use this opportunity to become more outgoing. Bert Wednesdays springs to mind, as well as events like NEoN later this year and Dare Protoplay next year. Not to mention the regular IGDA meetings across Scotland.

That’s really everything I can say. If you want to follow my endeavours more closely, I’m on Twitter as @DCOneFourSeven. I update that more frequently than I do this blog. For the mean time, see you on the flip side!

Well, I have something in the works. That should take shape over the next few weeks, and I look forward to sharing it.

Other than that I’m still looking for work, and applying for any jobs I feel I would do well in. It’s a time consuming process but hopefully it’ll soon be a rewarding one. Things are certainly progressing on that front, as I’ve had a few interviews and hopefully will have some more lined up. Time will tell.

Until then that’s pretty much it. I’m experimenting with iOS development and the Unity engine. Hopefully I’ll get to use these in the future for my projects, not the same one mind you.

Currently I’m looking at Python, mainly because of a recent role I have applied for. The language itself offers many benefits to traditional C style languages that I am used to, such as easier multi-platform implementation.It will be nice to run the project I am going to be creating with it (a small game prototype) on multiple platforms such as OS X and Windows.

From this I intend to carry that prototype forward onto the platform it was intended for with the next platform I’ll be investigating (iOS).

My goal for this is to gain some experience in many different areas and broaden my horizons. I feel my CV is being ignored by many companies for not including certain buzzwords like “iOS development” which seems to be more prominent in today’s job market, especially in Dundee.

With this I have now updated the University Work section of this site which includes links to all the source and demo applications I created during my final year.

The portfolio section of the site has been updated to include these videos, preceding each is a short paragraph describing the work and the way I feel about it.

Plan now is to keep applying for graduate programmer/coder jobs and hope someone picks me up sooner rather than later. This portfolio isn’t the end though. I’m going to continue to create new pieces of work to add to it in the mean time. My next thoughts are on iOS development, with which I’ll be experimenting in over the next few days/weeks. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to add something that has officially shipped to my portfolio.

Since I last updated, I shifted my primary blogging focus to my graded honours project blog. Which can be found at http://davidc147honours.wordpress.com/and will soon be rolled into this blog so that my thoughts and experiences are easily viewable here.

Currently I’m awaiting grades for my last few modules from Abertay, and then I’ll officially graduate on July 7th.

Work-wise, I am currently applying for Junior Programming roles in various studios around the UK and Europe. If you are an employer reading this, I would love to hear from you and feel free to take a look at my Portfolio and University work pages on the site. These are still getting updated with all my fourth year coursework over the next few days as I organise showreel videos for my favourite pieces of coursework. This will include my honours project and dissertation. For the mean time, all my coursework can be grabbed from my Windows Live Skydrive. My latest CV can also be grabbed from my Skydrive.

I’ll post again once my portfolio has been updated to highlight the key areas I want to bring to people’s attention.

So the project is pretty much wrapped up, and the programming for the project has been concluded, lest I find any heart stopping bugs. I got everything I planned in Week 12 in, in Week 12 and have spent the last few weeks polishing the application and adding an extra GUI layer to the application.

Somewhere in between that I found time to finish my other piece of coursework, a terrain editor and 4000+ word report on it.

My main focus now is on the write up, that’s been drafted, has been for a few weeks. I have a fortnight, in between meetings and working in that stupid shop, to redraft and add to it. Then it’s show time.

The showcase is on the 20th of May, a day after the project has to be submitted. Hopefully the turn out there will be good so I get the chance to show the project off.

Anyway, that’s it for this blog. Once submission is over with, I’ll add full details about the project, as well as all the work I’ve done for it. The work will then be added to my main blog and the accompanying portfolio, and then this blog it self will be absorbed into that.

CYOTFS.

Well from my notes I can tell you this:

Week 7: The glorious SSAO was achieved in Week 6, so Week 7 was spent perfecting and optimising. I noticed that you could get a performance boost by decreasing the buffer size of the AO map, although with this a separate shader would be required to merge the AO map and the colour map. This extra pass doesn’t drop the performance due to the small calculation it has to perform.

Week 8: Experimentation and a failed implementation of a blur shader to blur the result of the SSAO and hopefully improve the quality of it.

Week 9: Began working on AO maps.

Week 10 & 11: These weeks continued tweaking and attempting to implement the blur, alongside developing a second piece of coursework.

Week 12: Hopefully I’ll get the blur finished, and then get the AO maps done and in the app.

As Monday began I had a working AO algorithm that produced some likeable results at reasonable frame rates. However there was still some work to be done in terms of perfecting the results. I began the week working on an alternative piece of coursework for another module. This left little time for experimentation as both tuesday and wednesday for me are packed to the brim with shifts at various places of work. Monday and Tuesday afternoon allowed me to experiment with the various parameters for the algorithm, and pick and choose what worked best and on what hardware.

So far I’ve found that on an Nvidia 9600m GT graphics card in my laptop, that 16 to 24 samples can be taken by the algorithm and the application will still run at 30-50 frames per second.

On my more powerful AMD Radeon 4850 HD, 64 samples can be taken and the application far exceeds 60 frames per second.

On thursday, a blur shader was implemented to smooth the result of the SSAO algorithm. Upon doing this, it was discovered that a part of the algorithm had been misrepresented, and once this had been fixed, an immediately smoother result was acquired without the need for a blur algorithm.

The introduction to the dissertation has also begun being written. This should be finished on Tuesday afternoon. I will also be spending the next week finalising the models in the scene, and creating their accompanying AO maps. Then I shall begun to set up methods to switch between the different modes of the application, and ultimately allow for quick comparisons.