After a 12 hour long countdown on the Bungie website today, Bungie has released a teaser trailer for their next project, which is set in the Halo Universe.

The teaser trailer, entitled ‘Keep it Clean’ is very vague on details, however the keen eye will notice that it is in New Mombasa, the city destroyed in the beginning of Halo 2, and the fact that this game is still a part of Halo 3.

The trailer opens to cameras showing an evacuated New Mombasa. Then it cuts to some drop pods falling in the outer atmosphere.  The streets are deserted, as shown by the camera ‘Lubamba’ and there is a space elevator in the distance, as shown by camera ‘Mbaraki’. The camera cuts to thousands of drop pods falling in the distance, and focuses on a small group, before a large explosion (presumably the warp in Halo 2) occurs, destroying the city.

The AI and cameras reboot to show a destroyed city, however when the camera Mbaraki reappears, you see a single drop pod falling towards the city. It cuts to Halo 3, before showing the pod from a different angle, as it smashes past the camera. Then it cuts to black  and reads: “Prepare to drop”, before jerking around a bit more and reading Bungie, then showing the standard Xbox 360 clip.

Here are some more screenshots from the video. Note the entire trailer is pre-rendered, click on the thumbnails to get a hi-res version of the screenshot.

You can view the trailer for yourself, just head on over to Bungie.net and download it in either Quicktime or WMV, Small Medium or Large.

So TechED Sydney is over and I now have the time to post about the big announcement for students that came out of the event. On Tuesday Microsoft held TechEd Student Day, a free day for students to come along and sit in on a series of presentations geared towards students, TechEd style.

Aside from that, every University student who attended the University half of the day received 4 DVDs full of free software, ready for use. Now if you could not attend this event, do not fret, this is all available for you as well (if you are a student), however you need to download it for yourself.

Head to https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/ and Sign In with your Windows Live ID, and then verify your student status and you can get your keys and downloads for all the software listed. This includes:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro
• Visual Studio 2005 Pro
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• 12 Month XNA Creators Club Trial
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• Virtual PC 2007 (Great for use with Windows Server 2003)

Grab the downloads, grab the keys, and start making cool things with this free software. Anything you make can be distributed with a non-commercial license, so get to it!

The game enjoyed an ‘early’ release in Australia, I picked it up last week and had loads of fun! For those who do not know, Spore is the latest game from the genius game designer that is Will Wright. Here he has taken his Sim style of games, where you create more than you destroy, and expanded it more than ever.

Now you can create life from the cellular stage, modifying your creature through some really intuitive and powerful tools before you get to the tribal stage where the game turns into a little version of Populous. (Also created by a game design genius, in this case, Peter Molyneux)

The game is lot of fun and I would recommend it to everyone, however I do have some issues with the DRM the game uses to fight piracy. Electronic Arts decided to use Securom to ‘protect’ the game after a large amount of backlash came from their idea to have people activate every 10 days. Now the game activates upon installation, however there are a limited number of activations possible before you have to contact customer support to reset your counter. In my opinion this does more to hurt the legitimate consumer than it does the pirates, as the scheme has already been cracked.

Those issues aside, the game runs great and is lots of fun. On the technical side the game makes heavy use of procedural generation, for textures, models, music and animations. The use of procedural generation allows people to share their creations using a small file that weighs in at less than 100kb. (In most cases 20-30kb)

Maxis have also developed an innovative way of sharing the content. Inside your ‘My Documents\My Spore Creations’ folder, you will fine png files that are 128x128 and contain an image of the creation. This is actually all the data the game needs to generate the creature/ship/vehicle etc. To share this, you simply give the png to others and they put it in their folder, and it is ready for use. The bonus of this is that because it also contains the thumbnail, you can easily create a small gallery for people to browse.

Microsoft has just released the long-awaited SP1 update to Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 after being in beta for a number of months.

Download it here

SP1 brings loads of enhancements and features to both Visual Studio and .Net 3.5, including a major performance (20%-45%) boost for WPF, the ADO Entity Framework, and full support for the newly released SQL Server 2008.

Pretty cool. Wordle generates word clouds from text provided, or RSS feeds. This one for example came from my blog homepage.

It is free, just visit http://wordle.net/ to make one of your own. They use a Java applet to generate the image, and you can customise many aspects of it.

Microsoft has made a pretty good marketing ploy to help improve the image of Windows Vista.

Called “The Mojave Experiment”, they took a number of Vista ‘skeptics’ and showed them Windows “Mojave”, the next version of Windows. Overall these people, who had given Vista 4/10 or lower when asked in the beginning, rated “Mojave” really well.

Then Microsoft dropped the bombshell, Windows “Mojave” is really Windows Vista.

The positive reactions of the participants about Windows “Mojave” really shows that you need to experience things for yourself rather than relying only on what you hear, as most of them did. As one participant noted: “You have to see for yourself.”

You can see the video of the reactions and participants at the "Mojave" Experiment website.

Whilst searching through my RSS feeds today I found a little gem that could give you a nice boot time improvement.

It seems that even on dual/quad/n core machines, Vista boots using only one core. Peter Provost has a solution he found that will allow you to take advantage of all of your cores.

In summary the steps involve going to msconfig and changing the number of cores.

To do that:

1. Start –> Run
2. Type msconfig, click Ok
3. Click on the “Boot” tab
4. Click Advanced Options
5. Enable the checkbox titled “Number of Processors:”
6. Change the number to your number of cores using the drop down box
7. Click Ok
8. Click Ok/Apply
9. Restart

That is basically it, just follow those steps and you can enable Multi-Core startup.

This option also exists in Windows XP. It is under the tab named BOOT.INI, also under Advanced Options in there, however it is called /NUMPROC. A bit more advanced since there seems to be ini editing here, but either method isnt for a basic user

Not much has been heard on the Spore front recently, in comparison to two years ago. However today saw the release of the Spore Creature Creator Demo. Spore is the latest game from design genius Will Wright of SimCity and Sims fame. Taking the “Creation” gameplay idea to a whole new level by letting you create your own species and leading them from the cellular stage through evolution until they advance themselves to space travel.

The key element of the game that is being promoted by Will Wright and team, is the procedural content generation technology inside the game. To be able to create any kind of species you like, with practically any look, they let you do the art creation yourself through an easy tool, and generate the rest, like animations on the fly.

This tool, a simple modelling tool for your species, vehicles and buildings is what has been released early for fans to play around in. A demo of the Spore Creature Creator, featuring a subset of the “parts” available in the full game is now available to download from most game file sites on the Internet.

The editor is extremely simple to use, and does not need a tutorial or manual to start using. Some of the more advanced features are prompted by an unobtrusive text popup at the top of the screen, making it easy to jump into.

I did however find that creature textures were generated every time you switched from “Test Drive” mode to the editor and back. Which introduces a noticeable period of “lo-res” texturing on your creature. I feel that caching would have been a simple and effective option here, since if no changes are made during an editing phase, there is no need to regenerate the texture.

Aside from that, the editor was pretty easy and fun to use, and this is a good taste of a key element of the full game coming in September.

Go ahead and download the demo today, it weighs in at 205mb and runs pretty well on a decent system.

GameArena Download Link

or from the Official Spore Website (Mac version available there as well)

For those doing native application development that need a Physics or Animation product, Havok, partnered with Intel have released the world famous Havok Physics & Animation package for free.

This gives you the complete binary for use in your personal, educational or even commercial game as long as it is below US$10.

Currently there does not seem to be anything for XNA (despite an apparent job ad a while back), but I am sure this will be wrapped soon enough, and then the power of Havok will be available for use on the PC platform in XNA as well.

You can get Havok from http://tryhavok.intel.com. Just fill out the form and download the Programmer binaries and Artist tools.

I have been a Microsoft Student Partner since the beginning of this year, and in conjunction with the other MSP at UTS,(Chris Webster) have been planning a large event for this semester.

Recently we decided that the best thing to do was to give a talk on the ways you can get free (or cheap) software from Microsoft as a student.

The time has finally arrived.

How to get Free (and cheap) stuff from Microsoft

Slides and content will be available after the presentation, although probably only late night or next day due to a late lecture. :P

If you intend to come to the event, head to the website there and register your interest so we can get an idea of numbers.

Remember, not only do you take away the methods of gaining free software, but you also take away a bag of goodies and have the chance of winning a lucky door prize!