I always wondered why I had never noticed BAFTA’s Piccadilly HQ before but armed with the address and an iPhone I spotted the discreet entrance. An anonymous-looking set of doors that opened to reveal a swish foyer and a receptionist who happily had my name “on the list” already. How clandestine! How chic! How very, dare I say it… Hollywood? The swish interior of BAFTA, free bar and free Arkham City comic all were a great introduction for BAFTA’s sneak preview of Batman Arkham City. As I had thoroughly enjoyed, and indeed completed, Rocksteady’s first Batman game (Arkham Asylum) I was eager to get a look at the sequel.

Rocksteady Studios provided both their senior staff and a live demo of the game itself, which they jumped right into to show a level set in Arkham City. The demo was very entertaining with the Producer encouraging the very male audience to whoop whenever a particularly difficult takedown or new combo was performed. A particular crowd-pleaser was the “double silent takedown” wherein the Dark Knight grabs the heads of two unsuspecting goons and mashes them into the floor (in keeping with Batman’s rules of engagement, the goons are knocked unconscious rather than killed). Visually the game held up very well to being projected on a large movie screen, looking admirably like the original Arkham Asylum despite now having to render a much larger open-world play area. However, interior locations are still used extensively to keep the signature Arkham-verse stealth and combat tactics in use.

A nice touch on the audio side was use of intercepted communications and chats from nearby goons as Batman navigates the heights of Arkham City. Swooping effortlessly from rooftop to rooftop Batman hears the state of the city from the nervous exchanges of gossip between thugs. This makes exploration of the city an opportunity for narrative development and engagement.

Although Batman’s core “stealth melee” gameplay remains unchanged, new gadgets and abilities are – as expected – provided in the sequel. Demonstrated was an electronics-futzing gun that allows players to start motors, open doors or activate electromagnets to solve puzzles and progress through the environment. Electrical pulses can be positive or negative, offering a little more depth to the puzzle-solving gameplay.

An intriguing end-of-level cutscene hinted that the big boss in Arkham City may not be the Joker, as he apparently dies of complications following his massive drugs intake during the events of Arkham Asylum. Is this the True Death for the Joker? It seems an unlikely fate for the long-time arch enemy of Batman, but the Rocksteady devs wisely played their cards close to their chests and didn’t say. If I were a betting man I would assume a return at the end of Arkham City to set up Arkham 3 would be likely. Until then, other villains from Batman’s back catalogue provide the opposition, including Two Face and Iceman. No word as to the return of the Sandman and his hallucinogenic reality-bending levels. Personally I would love to see more of the Sandman as his levels provided a welcome break from tromping around Arkham Asylum and some of the more bold design choices in the original game, including one memorable sequence in which an endless corridor melted away to reveal a disturbing dreamscape of Batman’s fears.

An interesting change in Arkham City is the promise of GTA-style open world freedom in choosing which missions to undertake (presumably, only up to a point). Those who found the strict linearity of Arkham stifling should prefer having more choices this time. Additional variety in playable characters was confirmed as the game will start with the player in control of Catwoman, acting in some ways as training before taking the reins of the Dark Knight himself, presumably for the majority of the game.

Many more collectible and hidden items are promised with the cunning idea that many will be inaccessible when first seen. However once photographed they are then recorded on the in-game map to be searched for later, reducing the mental effort needed to track down every single Ridder trophy. Helpfully for occasional players, loading screens give you a synopsis of what you did last, so presumably if you take a break you can pick up pretty much were you left off.

After a pleasingly long live demonstration it was time for questions from the audience, with many ‘heads of department’ from Rocksteady on stage to provide answers. Although most of the questions were somewhat fluffy I felt some interesting tidbits did emerge from the Q&A session.

There was significant technical work on making the licensed Unreal Engine stream in the larger levels in Arkham City without putting up any “loading” screens. This time players will seamlessly traverse from exterior city-navigation into interior bat-stealth and combat sections. Rocksteady noted their preferred conceptual model for streaming was to maintain a ‘bubble’ of loaded high-quality assets around the player, making use of lower level-of-detail models for farther scenery. Fairly standard stuff in other words, although it’s likely there wasn’t time for a more detailed technical explanation.

Although sporting open-world gameplay as popularised by Grand Theft Auto, the developers confirmed that there will be no drivable vehicles in Arkham City (as in Asylum) claiming that “Batman is the best vehicle” for the game environment.

One of the better questions was about Detective mode, which many players of the first game used almost exclusively (to the chagrin of the art team). To give players an incentive to actually turn it off this time, the team differentiated the two modes by making the regular mode for navigation and Detective for stealth. For example, by changing the contrast in Detective mode, making the compass and some game secrets only visible in normal mode.

When asked if original villains be created for the Batman Asylum-verse the team responded that the fun thing about Batman is the villains don’t get killed so they “stick around” and you get to know them. So there are already plenty of canonical villains to choose from. (Which strongly suggests that the Joker is likely to make a reappearance in some form). In terms of working with the Batman IP in general, Rocksteady said that one advantage is that they do not need to tell the whole backstory – everyone knows what Batman’s motivation is. But there can be “too many” stories or characters to choose from.

To give more longevity to the Challenge Rooms (stand-alone “combat puzzles” in the first game) they have introduced Campaigns of several rooms in sequence. The twist is that you are given a number of Modifiers (or perks) for the campaign but have to decide which room to use a modifier on, so giving more variety to each Campaign.

A few short answers from the Q&A:
3D TVs will be supported, as is the current vogue. Rocksteady use focus testing but didn’t do it “too early” instead using it to refine and tweak the gameplay for a smoother experience. The classic Metroid series was revealed as being a large influence on the design of both Arkham games. The studio headcount is at about 100 people now. Their choice of Robin is Tim Drake rather than Dick Greyson.

When asked what was next for Rocksteady Studio they said they wanted to “continue making exceptional quality AAA games”, but they could not say exactly what was next.

From what they said regarding “working very hard to finish the game” it sounded like they had been in crunch for a while to finish the game. The first Arkham Asylum impressed with its polish, focus and originality, with impressive amount of ‘game’ from a relatively small team. Scaling up the scope and the team was an obvious next step in some regards, but is in my opinion a risky one. Doubling down on a large AAA sequel is quite common but if the game doesn’t do well, the risk is equally large. I would have loved to ask them about this and if they would have preferred to diversify and make two smaller games. Also, what are they doing to avoid crunch? Do they even think they need to? Had the crunch been worse on the sequel, what was their staff retention rate and so on. Sadly the questions were, I felt, a little too easy.

I got the impression Rocksteady was a somewhat “old school” developer and I am somewhat of the opinion that they are a dying breed. When every “bet” you make can break the company, you only need to fail once to bring it down. Watching how companies like Rocksteady adapt and survive (or don’t) in a changing commercial environment is going to be fascinating stuff. I wish them success, and can’t wait to get my hands on Arkham City.

B and I have been making up an Angry Kittens Calendar for 2011!

Gallery of jpegs:

or as a printable PDF (to fit square paper 28x28cm)

Ok, to be fair most of the time my internet connection is great – it’s nice and fast. But periodically it will go all wonky for a few days and then I want to ‘keep an eye’ on it. A bit tricky… However there are two good things: there’s a fairly simple web page on the router that gives me all its stats, and Be (my ISP) has an excellent forum with lots of helpful technical people & Be staff to give tips on what to do. So if I can gather useful info for them, I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it.

What I decided to do is only use Python to ‘scrape’ the data I wanted from the Router’s web page and the stuff it into some data store and give me a nice graph out of it. I did look at cacti/rrdtool but I would have had to install and configure lots of other things (as I’m on a Mac) and I just wanted to use Python ideally, because Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed.

So instead, I’ve knocked up a simple script that reads the Router status once a minute and writes a row of data out to a sqlite database (which is very simple to knock up). Then I have another script that reads out of that database and produces a html page with a graph or two. I’ve used the Google Visualisation API to draw the graphs, because they have a simple python API for it and a nice timeline graph that I can use.

I’ve a little Mac mini that I can leave on running my little ‘monitor.py’ script and Mac OS X has ‘web sharing’ (using Apache web server) that I can use to invoke ‘report.py’ to produce some nice interactive graphs of the history of my router. (a quick link on how to set this up)

So now I will leave this running for a while and see what data it produces. When I have a LOT of data I should probably summarise per hour and/or per day, and not keep every single minute’s worth of data. I don’t need to worry about that too much yet.

I might even be able to use this approach at work, although we do have Cacti set up there, so that may be a better option, but it is very complicated to configure and this might be a simpler/more flexible solution – especially with lots of good graphing solutions now out there.

The scripts are here: speedtouch_monitor.zip (41 KB)
They should work with a Speedtouch 585 Modem set to it’s default IP address (eg any Be customer).
You will probably need to enter your router’s password in the monitor.py file.

Also here is an example report from report.py.

Ladies and gentlemen who have purchased a new Apple Mac, take backups.

If I could offer you only one piece of advice for the future, taking backups would be it.

The long term benefits of taking backups have been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice… now:

Time Machine is built in to OS X and works both with external hard drives and Time Capsules (over wifi or ethernet). It will unobtrusively back up all your changes and will save your arse when your mac breaks / gets stolen / gets run over by a bus / etc. Use it!

If you are thinking of buying a Mac, do buy it with AppleCare – or go out and get it right now if you didn’t. Your Mac will then be kept working for 3 years, by which point you’ll most likely want to swap it for a new one anyway. I can’t recommend this highly enough, especially for laptops which do seem to be prone to hard disk failures (amongst other things). I know it’s not cheap but if something breaks, you will definitely get your money’s worth!

Spotlight is how I launch pretty much all my apps, rather than searching through start menus or anything else. Just hit Apple key + Space Bar and up pops the search window. Also useful for finding misplaced documents, emails, contacts and other things – but I mainly use it for starting apps.

Quick Look means never having to open a file to see what’s in it. Just hit the Space Bar with a file selected in Finder and it pops open a handy preview.

System Preferences if you’re trying to work out how to change settings on your mac, this is the place to start.

If you have a laptop, then two finger scrolling on web pages is your friend. I miss this a lot when using a PC. Remember you can plug any USB mouse in and have that work, so if you have an old mouse that you really like, you can still use it.

This is my one security tip: set up an Administrator account and make the account you use a Standard account. This means whenever apps want to install or doing anything out of the ordinary they need to ask your permission first. This makes your computer much safer against any nasty software. Talking of which, I don’t recommend running any Anti-virus programs – surprising but true! I don’t run any and never have on the Mac. There may come a time in the future where that’s not the case, but right now I’ve never seen or heard of any Mac malware that didn’t need to ask your permission to stuff your computer up first. So just exercise caution when you download and install applications and you should be fine.

Turn your Mac off sometimes, it is very fast to just use Sleep (or close the lid on a Macbook) but even Macs like to actually be turned off and on once in a while – they run some extra maintenance scripts and clean out cruft. Needless to say if your Mac is ever behaving oddly then the first rule (as with all IT stuff) is to try turning it off and on again. Seriously!

You can still use Firefox on the mac (download here) but I personally prefer Safari, the built-in web browser. There aren’t as many plugins and it’s not as tweakable as Firefox, but it is faster.

Apple Mail – I don’t use it because I’m not at any one mac often enough to keep my mail on it. I just use gmail (which works very well in Safari).

Which reminds me, if you use Google Calendar and Contacts you can get these to sync up with your iCal and Address Book on the mac.

Perian is great if you want to play any old kind of weird video formats – it just adds them all to Quicktime so it ‘just works’.

If you need to save a copy of a document or web page, press Print and then find the little PDF button the bottom left of the Print dialog. Click on that and choose Save as PDF. PDF support is built in to OS X (like support for zip files) so you don’t need to install Acrobat reader (in fact don’t, it is much slower than Preview).

Transmission is a great BitTorrent client and even has a web interface that works on an iPhone/iPod.

Cyberduck is the app to use when uploading files to FTP/SFTP/WebDAV/AmazonS3 — I sometimes use this for uploading things to my web site.

If you tire of using Front Row to browse your music/video from afar then Boxee seems to be shaping up very well as a ‘media center’ for your mac. It has an iPod/iPhone remote control app that makes it very handy.

If you’ve bought a new Mac you’ve probably got all the iLife apps on there. I can attest that GarageBand and iMovie are both handy for some light audio and video-remixing. If you need to do more involved audio editing then I’ve found Audacity to be useful, if a bit fiddly sometimes. If you want to encode video you can either do this from within Quicktime Player/iMovie or use Handbrake for more control.

I’ve recently ditched an old copy of Microsoft Office for iWork and Pages seems to be a lot easier on the eye. Haven’t quite got the hang of Numbers yet, but Keynote is definitely the easiest way to get slides for presentations sorted out. If you don’t have it free on your mac, iWork is not expensive (£70). You can also use Open Office if it has to be free – but I’ve given up on this recently as its just too fiddly to use (like many open source products, UI is not a priority).

If you decide after a few months that you need more memory in your Mac, I recommend Crucial as they’ve supplied me well for a few years now.

Finally if you need to do a ‘spring clean’ on your mac because its acting weird, I usually run Onyx which will clean out all manner of old caches and run the built-in Apple maintenance scripts. (Don’t forget to just turn it off and on sometimes).

I nearly forgot, to install a new application you usually just drag the icon to the Applications folder. Likewise to uninstall it just delete its icon from the Applications folder. It’s really that simple (OS X has a cunning way to package up all the data an app needs so that it is just in that one icon, which is much easier than the Program Files / registry malarkey on Windows).

If you only take one thing away from this, take backups. Seriously.

(There is more advice from Apple at their Switch to a Mac page.)

I’ve been on a little holiday or two recently and have been using B’s camera and Photoshop’s auto-panorama feature to make the following panorama (hosted on the excellent Flickr). Each are quite big, so its best to click on them and go to ‘all sizes’ and ‘original’ to see it big in Flickr. Enjoy.

(This last one is huuuge by the way)

As seen by myself and Bea this last week at Dawlish! Had a great little holiday despite noisy feckers on the campsite. Grr.