All Change

So quite out of the blue I find myself with a new job.

What happened was the company I currently work for sold off their UK design center (which was originally the company I first joined years and years ago that got bought out a few years back) to another company who make things like SSD’s as part of that I got moved over.

I was offered the choice not to move but since that would leave me supporting basically old products with no new stuff coming out (since all of that was what was sold to the new outfit) I couldn’t see much of a future in that role. I would be pretty secure for a while till they EOL’d the chips and then that would likely be it.

Anyway the upshot of this is finding myself with a new job at a new company without expecting it and without any details. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, who I’ll be working for, or really anything about how the transition will go.

It’s all a little intimidating. Long term it feels like the right move but right now there are so many unknowns it’s a bit much. At least I know I’m still employed and the new company are based nearby so I don’t have to move but at the moment that’s really all I know.

I’ll let you all know how it pans out.

One Year On

It’s been just over a year now since I moved out here to live in California and given the anniversary I figured some time in reflection would be in order. I started this blog as a place to put stuff specific to my american experience since I have other places to talk about normal things and figured this was a log of the struggles to acclimatise to a similar but often annoyingly different culture. As the time has gone on I’ve had less to say on this blog since I’ve been gradually settling in and everything has been becoming the norm but still every now and then I get surprised by something some Americanism or aspect of their culture that just catches me off guard.

The hardest part of deciding to move out here when I finally got the go ahead that they were making me an offer to go (which as I’ve stated before took two frustrating years) was the thought of being 6K miles from friends and family. I was fairly concerned about this going in it felt like that more than any other factor could break the endevour and make me want to come back to merry old England. The distances and cost involved with going home means it’s a serious trip to make not something one can do on a whim of a weekend.

While I have missed things like the board game days at Pete’s, the dvd nights at Rob’s, the cinema trips with Byrnie, and the weekend long lan parties, I haven’t felt as cut off from everyone as I feared. Most of that comes down to modern communications technology keeping in touch via the net is pretty easy and with arrangement the odd game of L4D was always doable being able to play and talk with people half way round the globe without much in the way of lag or cost is a modern marvel. Plus the on going collaborative world we have in the minecraft lackof server is a nice virtual meeting space. I still talk to my parents once a week though this time via Skype rather that paying a fortune on phone calls so I haven’t felt so out of touch as I was worried I would.

In addition to the worry of loosing the friends I already had there was the concern about how I would go about meeting any new people. I’m not the most outgoing of people definitely an introvert if not shy so I did wonder how I would meet people since my natural tendency of staying at home reading or playing games or going to the cinema are not really that conducive to meeting new people. This is where the meetup group I joined, the south bay geek club, had proved very helpful. Through it I had a way to meet like minded geeks for that essential human contact. I can turn up to an event and know that everyone there is more or less on the same sort of page while there are a surprising varience in interests and ages for these groups they’ve always been very friendly and welcoming. I’ve had lots of good experiences the regular board games nights and film nights as well as the various events I’ve been to with the group have been a great help. While the makeup of those sorts of meetips is often somewhat transitory with often different people every time it has been a starting point that through which I’ve been able to meet people and also start to build more meaningful links with locals such as my D&D group and I have hopes for the just started Scifi book group.

So all in all the negatives I perceived before moving out here haven’t proved to be as much as a negative as I expected.

There have been some problems which were complicated by my being out here an impractical timezone away from UK business hours. The issue with the first tennants I had in my flat was especially annoying where they bitched and bitched and threaten me with legal action accused me of being an uncaring slum landlord got one of the neighbors involved (who was someone I never met in the 7 odd years I lived there so unsure how and why he got involved but he wrote me a fairly offensive letter full of nasty accusations) disparaged my decorating skills and threatened to go to the local papers. It was one of those annoying situations where I couldn’t seem to do anything to make it work possibly because they just wanted to break the lease without getting stiffed by the contract they signed but it was a frustrating and costly no win situation as far as I was concerned where every time I thought it sorted they would come back and complain again a few weeks later.

The new guy so far has only bothered me about one thing which turned out to be perfectly valid (broken washing machine motor) I gave them the number of the warranty people and they fixed and that was that no further bother since then he’s been a quiet tenant which is sort of how I would prefer it.

My job hasn’t changed much since I’ve been out here the location makes some thing easier (it’s now an hours flight to our main customers rather than 11 hours so I can easily go home on the weekend and not suffer from jetlag the only down side is it’s now so much easier it means they send me much more often) and other things harder (I can’t physically grab other engineers and shake an answer out of them). The pay seemed like an increase initially (I won’t be so uncouth as to quote numbers but my US salary was a significant chunk more than just a straight dollar to pound conversion would have been not quite double but almost) but given the cost of living out here has equated to about the same standard of living as I had in the UK. The apartment building I rent in is a touch nicer than you’d get in the UK with facilities (the only facilities I had in my UK flat was an enclosure for the bins and a door entry phone that didn’t work here I have several pools & jacuzzi’s, Gym’s, an indoor basketball court, Internet rooms, an onsite starbucks quiznos and little market) some of that sort of thing seems standard for anything but the crappiest of places. When I was looking I saw 10 different buildings some cheap some more pricey than my current place and all of them had pools and gyms and other little things.

The upsides of being out here have been plentiful lovely weather most of the time I’m closer to a lot of “the action” so can do things like go to Maker faire PAX and all sorts which previously would have required elaborate planning. California and the bay area in particular are full of immigrants from all over the world so it’s a very mixed place with all manner of people from all over the world. I still occasionally come across that american pride thing the we are number one syndrome. When ever there is some big event you will almost certainly hear someone say how it’s only possible to do this thing in freedom loving america. Which just isn’t true even in an area full of immigrants where a lot of the technical expertise is from overseas there is still this blinkered america is the only country that exists attitude. It’s off putting because this place isn’t without it’s faults and I often think america is guilty of being too focused on the good things and just ignoring the bad even going out of their way to demonize people who bring up failings with the “why do you hate america” stuff.

I’ve got another year and a bit to run on my visa and without going into details if feels like given the redundancies in the UK team that my days would be numbered, which almost makes the decision for me. I think it would be worth staying especially if I can in the process wangle a green card which would give me a lot more freedom we’ll see how things go and what happens with the immigration people as to how long they let me stay out here. It looks like this could be the first time having a masters degree gave me a tangible benefit since they have separate pools for people with masters.

Anyway I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

In search of Caffeination

I tend to separate work and home by the type of beverage I drink. At work it’s coffee and at home tea. But recently I’d been trying the idea of having a coffee machine at home. I used to have a cafetiere in the UK for those odd occasions when I needed a cup of joe as they say out here I would brew up a pot in that however I would often forget to clean it up and given the infrequent use this deterred use when I did fancy a coffee.  On that note I decided this time to try one of the new pod coffee machines that have been sweeping the market.

The first task was to identify which type to go for since they all have a certain type of pod and none of them are compatible with any other. There seem to be three main types of coffee pod available in the consumer arena there are a few specialist ones as well but since they are special order and the pods not available in the shops I’ll ignore those. So I had to chose between Senseo (which is Philips and Douwe Egberts, a subsidiary of Sara Lee Corporation), Keurig or the K-cup system, and Tassimo or T-Disk System (made by Kraft foods).

The prices of the machines was not much to choose between them so I hammered the various reviews. It seemed the Senseo system was a bit of a dead end hard to get so I ruled it out. That left the other two, the reviews were fairly even a lot of people liking one machine over the other. Eventually I picked the Tassimo machine for it’s ability to do Cappicino with milk frothing out of the box and its impressive array of name brand drinks (like Starbucks twinings and so on)

The machine I picked was made by Bosch a neat little black box with the water tank on the back with an integrated water filter to keep the machine ungunked and improve the taste of the coffee. It has a sort of clamp system where you put the T-disk into the slot clamp it shut and then hit the go button. The machine reads a barcode on the disk and from that works out what to do to make the drink. There’s no settings to do just hit the button and away it goes. Once it’s finished you have the option of adding more water for larger cups. For Latte or capicinos the milk comes in a separate disk you do as a second stage. For most single disk drinks it’s done in 30-60 seconds and ready to drink you just pop the finished T-disk out and you’re done no mess and very quick and easy.

I purchased a batch of different disks off amazon who have a lot of different brands at reasonable prices and spent the weekend trying out various coffee brands. It does also do hot chocolate and a pretty good earl grey.

One thing I noticed that may mean I backed the wrong horse in the long run was a lack of choice of T -disks in the regular stores. They did maybe one or two types but the K-cups are ubiquitous and in every flavor imaginable. Since getting stuff from amazon is not a big problem for the more fancy Caramel Latte Macchiato and the like it’s probably not a big problem since I can fuel up on my more generic morning blend of coffee at the local target.

In the end I have a machine that with very little effort I can stuff a cup under press a button and then get a nice steaming hot cup of coffee for no effort and with no fuss. Clean up us as simple as pop out the dead disk chuck it and the machine is ready to go again. Which is all I really wanted.

Random Things

Not posted anything here in a while figured I probably should.

Have noticed strange things about living in the US. All property bought or rent is rated by square footage rather than the UK system of how many bedrooms it has. So when you say you just moved to a new flat people will ask how many square feet is it rather than how many bedrooms. This confused me as one I don’t know how to do imperial measurements in small increments like feet and inches and also because it never occured to me this was in anyway relevant.

Eggs don’t come in packs smaller than a dozen. You can get 12 or 24 but not the usual pack of six you would expect.

They don’t have paracetamol out here or ibuprofen … or rather they do but it won’t be called either of those names. They call Paracetemol acetaminophen instead out here and Ibuprofen is usually only called by trade names.

There are probably other random things but I’ve forgotten them.

Back in black

PLA proved a lot of trouble it tended to jam the extruder once to the extent I had to dismantle it. Also getting quality objects out of it was difficult the retained heat proved to be a problem in that objects would stay hot enough to be flexible far longer than with ABS and thus deform while building. I tried the cool plug in for skeinforge but this made things even worse as it orbits the object for a while to let it cool this had the effect of wrapping the object in trailing filament fibres from the extruder twisting the object as it did it.

So I cleaned out the extruder and switched to the reel of black ABS. ABS had some trouble sticking to the Automated Build Platform so I also swapped back to the heated build platform which has a nice smooth Kapton base that the ABS will stick to nicely.

So it was back to getting good print quality again and I spent some time printing out more cubes to get the settings right. It took about 16 goes to get something almost right. I eventually printed a pretty decent dodecahedron. One problem I discovered is that in the newest version of Skeinforge the fill pattern now runs parallel to the raft making it hard to remove once the object has cooled previously the fill pattern was diagonal so detaching the raft was a bit easier.

Now with the printer going and pretty close to fine tuned I’ll probably print a few more test objects then look at some printer upgrades.

In Bike riding I’ve been going over the same distance trying to improve my time a bit. Weather conditions have been getting worse it’s a lot colder and raining but once your going you don’t really notice it so much. In my constant battle with darkness I got hold of one of those head torches this was a 3 watt led one with a nice rechargeable battery. Mounted to my cycle helmet it works pretty well like a headlight. All my other lights can now be set to flashing don’t run me over warning lights.

Problematic Plastic

So I had a bash at getting PLA going last night one thing I discovered is the filament storage box (which has a sort of reel + lazy susan connected to a low friction pipe running the filament to the extruder) is not well designed for changing out the reels. I had to unscrew everything and then found most of it wouldn’t go back together with the new reel in.

Besides that I shoved in the new filament and started it off at an appropriate temperature and off it went. I go some sort of weird hybrid of abs and pla for a while which eventually cleared to a nice clean see through PLA.

So far so good I thought and started on my first test cube. The results I got were a molten mess the cube stayed hot and so distorted. I changed the settings and tried again … but got no filament out of the extruder. I fiddled with the settings for a bit but eventually resorted to yanking the filament out. I found the filament had bulged out and jammed the extruder. I assumed I was running too hot chopped out the broken session and ran it again.

I had about three goes like this till it started repeatedly jamming. What was happening was the heat from the extruder was travelling up the filament and causing it to soften but not liquify in the extruder barrel. This meant that the squishy filament expanded outwards as the motor driving the thing put pressure on it from above locking it in place. Cutting this bit out and starting with a fresh filament and extruding immediately worked but if it sat idle for any length of time so the heat could spread up the filament making it jam and then either ruining a build or failing to produce one. I tried various approaches to fix this higher and lower temperatures increasing the tension in the pusher to try and ram the filament through. But had no luck.

Eventually I managed to jam the extruder such that I couldn’t get the filament out again. I called it a night at this and figured I’ll dismantle the extruder tomorrow and see if I can extract the filament. I might try aiming a fan at the top of the extruder to see if that cools it sufficiently that the filament remains hard enough to still get further into the barrel where the tempertature is high enough to melt there is also a small heat sink on the barrel I might try moving that further down or maybe getting another one. It would be nice to get some consistent prints out of PLA without having to cut a section off each time and risk a jam that requires disassembly. I like the look and feel of PLA it’s hard and glassy and a nice crystal like transparent effect. Plus I have a huge reel of the stuff.

If the worst comes to the worst I’ll switch to the Black ABS I have on standby but I’d prefer to get some use out of the PLA if possible. A lot of people in the mendel world have had better luck with PLA and I did also do fairly well with it on the BFB printer (most of the parts I printed for the mendel are in PLA) so it could be down to the extruder design. With that in mind if I get round to assembling my own mendel I might be able to come up with a hot end that works with the PLA I have and leave the ABS for my little makerbot instead.

Incremental Improvements in print quality

So after my bike ride last night I ran up the makerbot and began experimenting with the settings in skeinforge according to some helpful guides someone had put up recently. Skeinforge is a very powerful bit of software that can take an STL model and slice it into layers for the makerbot to build but it’s also something of a enigma in terms of user friendlyness. It has numerous settings and values most of which are hard to work out and trying to get a print out of it is tricky.

When I was using the old trusty BfB printer that I gave to Byrnie I used a set of comercial software called Netfab that had automated calibration and a whole host of nice features to facilitate good quality prints. However that only works for the BFB printer.

Anyway as per the recommendations on line I began with a simple profile and set the printer to make a standard test object a 20*20*10 mm cube. Normally with 3d printers rather than fill the whole object with plastic (which means a lot of plastic and often isn’t necessary for a strong print assuming your infill algorithm uses some sufficiently clever pattern) they create a solid outer shell then fill only a percentage of the internal ‘solid’ space. Now according to the tutorials the key for getting good prints is to get the flow rate of plastic right for a given layer size this is related to the amount of plastic the machine is pumping  out (the speed of the motor driving the pinch wheel) the size of the nozzle (which is essentially a fixed value for most setups you can change it but you probably aren’t going to in the short term) and also the speed with which the print head moves as it’s extruding. As the plastic comes out and sticks to the base it gets dragged along by the print head so if the print head moves slowly you get a nice fat splurge of plastic (often used to make rafts at the base of prints to improve grip on the build area) if it moves much more quickly the same string of plastic is stretched out thinner to make smaller layers. So in the tests we want to see if there is too much plastic (and then increase the speed of the head or decrease the speed of the motor) or too little (and do the reverse).  By using 100% infill there is no air space in the object which would allow extra plastic a place to go making it more difficult to spot if the extruder is pumping too much of the stuff out.

So with that in mind I ran up an object with the layer thickness of 0.32 Width/thickness 1.4 then a flowrate mm/s of 42.25 and a motor speed PWM of 255 (which is the maximum) with those settings locked in I ran up the test object and generated the gcode then set it printing. The results weren’t very promising

Way too much plastic the object stuck to the head as a result and got dragged about.

I upped the speed to 45 mm/s and tried again.

Slightly better but still not good.  I decided to stick with only changing one variable so stuck with flowrate and increased things to 50 mm/s.

Still too much so 55 mm/s.

60 mm/s

and finally 65 mm/s

It might look like this was the first success but in this case I ran out of ABS filament mid print. It did look very promising though, a closer inspection suggested we still might be a getting a bit too much plastic but it might well have completed printing had I had the plastic to allow it to.

Here we can see the results side by side

You can see for each increase in speed the print got a bit further.

Having done all this work I might well be back to square one at this stage. I do have some more plastic waiting in the wings ready to go, in fact I have two lots black ABS and clear PLA but both of these might well exhibit different flow characteristics to the white ABS I was testing with.  That may not be a total loss as the setting I was converging on had the print head moving very quickly possibly up to the limits it was capable of which would have an impact on the quality of the resulting objects so even if I had loads of white abs to play with I might well have done a series of more test to reduce the speed a bit as well as reducing the motor PWM to allow a slower print with the same correct amount of polymer.

A Series of Unplanned Upgrades

I’ve been playing with my makerbot off and on but mainly adding various new bits of hardware to it. When I got the kit I ordered it with the heated build platform but at the time I wasn’t getting good enough prints out of the thing to feel it worth the effort of building and installing the thing. Once I had upgraded the print head and gotten better polymer flow rates out of it I had a go at assembling the thing. I had a few issues with the setting not being quite right it would not move sufficiently far layer by layer and then end up dragging the print head through the print. On a small print where the polymer stayed mailable it just made the print messy on longer prints where the plastic had time to harden it caused layer offset problems where the head would catch on the layer and move out of alignment.

I eventually got some settings that worked and had a go at the heated build platform and got some nice prints out of the thing. At this point I started to run low on white ABS plastic. I did have a large reel of black ABS but I had the idea to make some christmas light up trees in this fashion http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1406 and so thinking crystal like PLA would work better than black ABS ordered a reel of that. While I was ordering stuff I also figured the new Automated build platform would be worth a try if I wanted to print several of the trees out at once (the ABP is basically a heated bed with a plastic conveyer belt on top so at the end of a print it rotates the belt and the current print pops off so the machine can commence a second print).

I built the ABP and began some tests using the remaining ABS plastic. There were also a few upgrades to the host software for makerbot and in the process I lost my custom settings for skeinforge (the software that does the slice and dice of the object turning it into gcode tool paths for the makerbot to follow). So I had old problems of the head catching on layers combined an possibly exacerbated by a new problem of ABS not sticking to the belt on the ABP. I got some luck by deploying the universal cureall blue painters tape. Which stuff sticks to like glue. Now I need to try and retune my skeinforge parameters, handilly there are some new guides on how to do that linked off the makerbot blogs http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/configuring-skeinforge-index-to-articles/

So anyway while I seem to have done a lot of work to achieve nothing much I’m hopeful I’ll be getting better results out of the thing soon. I’ve also started playing a game of D&D with some geek club members and I figure it might be nice to print my own miniture complete with glowy LED insert, to that end I bought a bag of 10mm leds and a load of 2032 lithium cells from amazon for about 10 bucks so now all I need is to design a miniture and get the printer up to spec.

The sights, sounds, and smells of the bay by night

I’ve been getting into the cycling of late. After a rough start where I had my bike nicked after only a couple of weeks of owning it and then the requisit wait to see if anyone would return the thing I got another identical model from the shop.

It’s a DiamondBack Sorento 2010 which is a mountain bike with front suspension and a fairly light frame. I did look at road bikes but I don’t like cycling on the roads and those flimsy tires would last about three seconds on some of the biking trails I’ve been trying out down here.

With the new bike in place I then had a period of various things falling off it. When in the shop I refused to pay for the extended warranty despite the guy saying bikes were almost impossible to repair on your own implying I would need a full machine shop, metal forming, cnc milling, welding gear, and a plasma cutter just to re-tension the gears (as it happens I have access to all of that through techshop). I kept refusing and eventually he aquiested and made some throwaway comment about never putting the bike in the topmost gear as it would break the chain, which seemed odd since the thing was designed to use the gears installed otherwise what’s the point of having all those cogs.

I think as revenge or just due to incompetence he set the bike up in the most shoddy way possible the brakes barely worked the gears didn’t shift or over shifted such that the chain came off. This resulted in the chain getting caught between the main peddle gear and the frame and then snapping when I didn’t notice and put my not insignificant weight on it to push off at the lights. It took me a few days some new tools and a new chain to fix these issues but eventually I got the bike in some sort of order so it was ridable and would stop. It still needs a few minor adjustments but now it’s tweaking rather than stopping the chain coming off or finding that when you want to stop as you roll at speed towards a busy intersection you can’t.

When I first picked up the bike it was getting dark around 8:30 9 pm so I could get home from work set off and be back in the light. Now it gets dark a lot earlier and unless I leave extra early it’s dark by the time I get home let alone get stuff together to set off. This is another reason for staying off the roads. As it happens there are some nice trails which are fairly level and fairly empty during the evening that stretch from my flat all the way into San Jose one way or out to the bay the other. This nice gravel path set alongside a stream makes for a good run and it also links up with the Bay Trail a 500 mile trail that goes round the bay.

As I’ve been getting up to more and more distance (last night I managed a 14 mile round trip) and managing more regular trips out I’ve been taking in more and more of the bay trail as part of my ride. The initial route that links up to the bay trail is basically along a stream in the middle of industrial and residential streets. Then you hit the bay and it’s somewhat different.

One side you have what seems to be  a nature preserve with lots of water birds (some of the less firm paths more designed for walking head out into the bay in these loops surrounding small separated off parts of the bay). I’m sure in the daylight it’s very very pretty but so far I’ve only seen it by the light of my bikes led lights which, though they do a good job of showing me the path so I don’t end up in the bay, don’t spread to the world around me.  This means you mostly see the other side which is made up of motorway, gas works, a waste recycling plant, and some sort of baseball field. The baseball field has thousands of watts of lights that are fine next to it and cycling away but completely bugger your night vision going towards it the other two add a more distinctive aroma’s to the local air.

Looking at the map the next place I will get towards is Moffet field, I’m not sure where the route goes to accomodate the airstrip there so I may have to cut inland. I guess it’s all part of the adventure.

PAX Day 3

I woke fairly late on day three something like 10am. The sunday is probably the wind down day of PAX there were few events I wanted to look into and I planned to spend the day on the convention floor.

I didn’t have the hotel for another night and so had to check out. Given tomorrow is labor day a free holiday I probably should have stayed on but I didn’t know that at booking time and wanted to save holiday.

So I grabbed all my stuff in a heavy backpack and headed out. I started the day right by getting a breakfast Burrito (at the excellent blue water taco grill) which contained scrambled eggs, bacon, pica de gallo, and medium salsa. I wolfed that down with a mountain dew for refreshment and thusly fortified I headed for the convention center.

It was even more packed than the other days, I fifgured it would be nice of I managed to get a play on Duke Nukem Forever so prepared for a couple of hours wait I tried to find the end of the queue. When I couldn’t work out where the end of the queue was I asked a lady in the queue and she informed me it was so long it was now fractured over the convention center interior into a series of mini queues. The total time was something like 4 hours to get to the front. I decided that was a little too much time to commit to one game. She pointed out by way of an alternative that me the queue to get something signed by the voice of Duke Nukem Jon St. John was pretty short but I passed on that too.

I started off with a game of Monday Night Combat, a XBLA title which was a class based multiplayer shooter with team vs team. It was pretty good fun even if I had little clue what I was doing. Each class seemed to have special abilities and could purchase upgrades by earning money in the ring (a bit CS like). It was all bright colours and chucky graphics and a lot of fun to play.

Next up I found a queue for Guild Wars 2 that wasn’t too long, while I was waiting a random woman wanted a picture of my tshirt (I was wearing my “Joss Whedon is my master now” which did get a lot of “nice shirt” comments so it has geek cred). The people in front of me dropped out so I was now the next in line. Half an hour later it was my go. The machine I was looking at had the 3d shutter glasses with it and it demonstrated Guild Wars 2 in full 3d.

The 3d after some initial false starts and face adjustment (wearing 3d goggles and a head set is tough they don’t work together very well) did work quite well. The sense of depth is impressive and it worked well with the detailed environments they have in the new game. One area where it was problematic was finding the mouse pointer since the mouse pointer and elements of the UI were often at different depths you could get lost trying to get the mouse pointer to click somewhere. GW2 seems to be a lot more of a story than before rather than “go kill 10 of x” it was more of a believable quest trying to rescue a kidnapped sister. It may derive down to killing 10 of x at the base but it didn’t feel like it. The combat has some of the more action orientated approaches from things like champions online where some skills you hold down. I played necro and had a sort of second mode I could briefly enter after filling up a death bar that gave me different powers. It all looked amazing but it also seemed to have been streamlined so there was less trecking around unnecessarily. You could exit instances back to the hub quickly and also teleport to known waypoints with ease. There was also a fair amount of voice work, maybe not full voice but certainly the main quests. It played a lot more like a single player game than an MMO and the group instances where everyone had the same task was a bit like the open/public quest of WAR or Champions where it was just drop in and out no need to organise or approach it as a predefined group. All in all very promising as a game and probably too deep for half an hours play to get much a grip on but still I think I’ll check it out on release.

The addition of 3d as main feature does pose something of a problem for marketing the product something the 3DS is definately going to face, since 3d is a major selling point yet video or stills are not capable of reproducing this (for the most part) advertising it except in person will have to rely on 2d images which may well work against it. Something that looks fantastic with full 3d may well look run of the mill in 2d.

Next I played an Alpha build of this game “Haunted: The Demons Forge” which was a sort of co-op two player hack and slash action game for the usual platforms. I played it with one of the producers from Bethesda. It was pretty fun a good mix of up close smashing with the big muscle bound Conan esq character and some snipey long range arrow stuff with the other scantily clad bow girl. Each had both melee and ranged tho they specialised in one and magic which they could also use to buff their partner increasing their power. It was full of lots of team work inspiring events and some nice set pieces and it also looked quite nice, the level I saw was a sort of haunted ruins feel to it. Not sure how this would play on your own I suspect even f it has AI for the partner it would suffer a bit. That comes out next year some time.

Refueled with a Chili Dog, which was fairly edible if a little messy.

Next I had a go on the Playstation Move or Kaz Hirai’s Magical Wang as it’s more commonly known they were demoing the excellent Heavy Rain with the new control system. I have to say it made more sense and felt a lot more immersive than the previous Sixaxis variant. It took some getting used to the controls but once you had the technique down the motion felt very natural to do the various things in the game world.

Having tried the wang I needed to test out the Microsoft wangless magical wang or Kinect as they call it. While I was queueing I saw a girl dressed in a wonderfully elaborate Halo Spartan suit play the dance game and win which was quite impressive given it completely covered her head to toe with a fill face visor. I only knew she was a girl because she had to take off her helmet to fix a bit that came loose on her boots. Anyway I played a game that was basically a wii sports for kinect done by good old brit developer Rare. Who of course haven’t made a decent game since they moved to microsoft except maybe Viva Pinata. It was two player and initially it felt a bit like I was flailing around at random rather than controlling things. After a few knockdowns I worked out what gestures the thing wanted and got better at making it do what I wanted. I eventually won my bout by repeatedly smashing my opponent in the kidneys.

Not sure about Kinect from this demo it was hard to tell from it how my actions were controlling it and how much control I had. It was possibly not the best app to try out to get a feel for it.

After that I tried this XBLA game called hydrophobia which was a sort of action platformer set on a massive ship (at some point in the future I didn’t get much of the back story from the demo) that is being attacked. It’s main selling point was highly detailed water physics and it did indeed work quite well areas would flood and if you opened doors from or too flooded areas the water would rush in/ flown out and it all seemed pretty impressive for something running at a good frame rate. I get the feeling this is used as part of puzzles and the various environmental states like water fire and so on will be used in the course of the game. The demo was a bit short just a few brief platforming sections but it showed a lot of promise one to keep and eye on.

Next I queued up for a very brief go on Star Wars The Old Republic or KOTOR the mmo as I like to think of it. Bioware taking the single player KOTOR idea and expanding it into an MMO. I only got 15 minutes on it so not a lot to get your teeth into. I played a sith of some description and it was a fairly standard MMO in a lot of ways set of skills with cool down timers. The quests were all fully voiced and the dialog for my character was also there which I find makes a surprising difference to feeling connected to the world. So with Dragon Age the lack of it did feel like a step back after Mass Effect 2. Supposedly it plays a lot more like a single player game with positioning and targeting making a difference to the outcome but that was hard to judge in my brief taste. It was very pretty and fun to play.

Once that was done I had to head for the Airport, the light rail back was crammed with geeks all off on planes home and the odd bemused looking commuter. I got to Seatac in good time and booked on the plane getting back to San Jose CA in good time picking up my car and then heading home where I am now typing this up before I forget

So in summary Seattle is very steep and PAX involves lots of queuing so need good footwear and perhaps a folding chair. The early morning panels were a good laugh but need to better plan others. Concerts are well worth attending but eat up a big chunk of the day if you have to queue for them, if you can get the early bird wrist band by being in the first section of the queue in the morning this is worth it later on as you can just waltz in to the front of the line. The Friday seems to be the quietest day try to get the big things that will have long queues later done here. The conference floor is quite disorientating and huge needs some time to acclimatise and work out what to see.

So other things I saw that I didn’t play: Epic Mickey made by Warren Spector for Wii interesting looking game making use of the magic brush idea to alter environments. Fallout New Vegas, uncharatable people have called this just another mission pack for Fallout 3, and they’re basically right it adds a load of new stuff but it doesn’t seem to alter the game play in any fundamental way. It’s not Fallout 4 so much as it is Fallout 3.1. Torchlite 2 looked like torchlite 1 but now with co-op, no bad thing torchlite was a fun little low impact pick up and play hack and slash. Rift some other MMO looked fairly standard. End of Nations, some sort of pc RTS I did get on a machine for this but couldn’t figure it out looked fairly standard fare tho. Two worlds 2 looked fairly polished from the gameplay I saw hard to tell what sort of fun quotient there was. Aion the new thingy (can’t remember what their new thing was called) I felt a bit sorry for the Aion peeps they were right next to their bigger badder brothers in the NC Soft clan the Guild War 2 booth where all the machines were at least 5 deep of people and there were very few people even glancing at their new stuff. Assassins Creed Brotherhood new multiplayer stuff was what they were flogging long queue for that looked fun from a distance. Alienware, not sure what they were flogging I wanted to get a look at their gaming netbook running some games but all they had on them was some sort of tornament signup page they were running on their big rigs. Nvidia were pushing 3d and multi screen gaming (a couple of others like evga were also doing this) mostly existing stuff running with shutter glasses and 120hz monitors, the GW2 demo was using the same kit. Halo reach … meh it’s just halo nothing exciting there. Meddle of Honor looked standard. The new Tron game looked interesting tried to get a go on this but ran out of time it had some action stuff and some light bikes. ID’s Rage … they had a booth but that was it. Portal 2 line was massive. Dragon Age 2 line was massive. Hothead had some videos on their new project swarm looked lemmings esq. Telltale had a load of their games on display and a delorean out the back since they are doing a back to the future game but I didn’t see any new details.

Also saw the odd board gaming bit, flying frog had some sort of alien game I’d not seen like last night on earth I suspect. Some outfit were flogging ridiculously elaborate gaming tables for serious money along with racks for Japanese swords. Looked in vein for dice for pete didn’t find the ones he was after closest I came was someone claiming the worlds smallest metal polyhedral dice which were sub penny sized. Didn’t look that practical tho.

So there was loads going on at PAX that I barely skirted the table top areas on other floors I wandered briefly through but didn’t really look at in detail, there is so much going on at PAX it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

All in all I had a excellent time and would definitely look at going again next year. PAX itself is pretty cheap 55 bucks for the three days the major cost is in the hotels and plane fees to get there. The hotels they recommend are fairly classy joints and carry a premium but partly that is also location they are very convenient for the major locations in PAX so for convenience rate highly. I didn’t see much of Seattle proper my wandering was confined to the few blocks between Benaroya hall, the hotel, and the convention center. I would have liked to check it out as I hear good things but I just didn’t have the time. Maybe next year at PAX 2011