Hearted Users (Subsample from early December). Generated by fdp (graphviz). 2877 nodes, 3803 edges. Click to enlarge.

One of my resolutions the past few years has been to try to do something news-worthy (though nothing notorious) during the year. 2008 was a bit of a bumper year with PS3iPlayer, O:SC and Sackbook getting mentioned by purveyors of fine tech and gaming news, so this year I’m going to cheat a little and reserve Sackbook (Strikes Back) to 2009.

For those waiting for an update on what’s happening with Sackbook; I’m afraid I can’t give any firm timescales as to when the site will be up and running – things move slowly at this time of year (everyone is too full of good nosh). However I have been using my time between scoffing turkey sandwiches and mince pies productively to get some funky new features on the site. Here’s a sneak peak of a couple:

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.

What went wrong? Well when working out LBP’s texture format (so I could convert the pictures to a format you can see in your web-browser) I only looked at photos taken in-game (which are 320×180px), turns out the pictures you take using a PlayStation Eye are slightly larger, at 320×240px. This pushes the filesize over a limit at which the structure of the file changes slightly. I hadn’t accounted for this and so the conversion process quit unexpectedly.

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.