Chris Warren’s Rather Neglected Website
Operation: Sleeper Cell, our little fundraising game for Cancer Research UK, has been gradually winding up over the past few weeks. I’m hoping to keep the site up and running to let players continue to solve the puzzles and carry on donating if they’re feeling super-generous.
We got some wonderful news today – Aleks, of the Guardian’s Gamesblog, has named OSC as one of her top 5 games of the year amongst other greats such as Braid and LittleBigPlanet. Thank you Aleks!
I’ve had a few people tell me that some of their pictures aren’t showing up on Sackbook. After considerable hair-pulling I’ve worked out what’s going on and I think I’ve fixed it (slightly more technical detail after the jump!)
However there’s a slight problem; there’s now a few corrupt converted images out there which have either a black strip along the bottom, or a strip filled with funny colours. If you spot any of these on the site, please send me a message or leave a comment here with the address of the level or profile in question and I’ll get the site to reconvert them.
You wait ages for a useful feature and two come along at once. PS3iPlayer.com has been updated to support the last night’s 2.53 firmware update. If you’re running version 2.53 or greater you should get the high quality H.264 streams (when available) and when playback begins, the player will automatically fill the screen. As before, press the circle button to get back to the webpage (as feared, no other buttons work in full-screen mode.)
The framerate isn’t as smooth as I’d like, so I might try and implement the BBC’s high/normal quality switch so users can decide between image quality or framerate.
Update: It didn’t take long for me to have enough of the choppy playback. I’ve gone ahead and implemented the BBC’s high/normal quality switch. As with the BBC’s iPlayer on the PC, the default quality is ‘normal’ and if you click ‘Play high quality’, it will play the H.264 stream. You can tell which version it’s going to play as it appears in parentheses after the ‘Press X to play’ message.
PS3 Firmware 2.53 finally hit last night, bringing full-screen flash and RTMP support (and possibly other unknown treats), the BBC switched on the redirection to point the PS3 to the iPlayer’s BigScreen interface (which works well) and I soft-launched my latest PS3-related project, a social-networking site for LittleBigPlanet with a difference; it integrates somewhat with live data from the game. It is “beta” at the moment (what web-based projects aren’t these days?) but you can check it out at www.sackbook.com
For those wondering, despite the BBC officially supporting the PS3, PS3iPlayer.com will not be vanishing. For those who prefer its interface to the BBC’s offering, I’ll try to keep it well-maintained. Speaking of which, tonight I’ll add support for 2.53’s full-screen support and see if it helps with the H.264 problems we’ve been having.