Game On

TOCA Bug!

Having a quick go of TOCA World Touring Cars last night, I couldn’t help but notice the amazing quality of sound output in replay mode.

This was the first time I’d played it with the surround sound speakers connected to my TV and the engine sounds and squeeling tyres seemed to be coming from everywhere!

I decided to load up one of my saved replays to demonstrate this newly discovered audio excellence to my flat-mate.

The replay was one of a race at Monza in the dark, where I overtook the first placed car with an audacious move in the last chicane, as I remember it. Sadly, the memory is all I have because the replay was screwed! My car got caught up in an accident in the first chicane, which I didn’t remember happening, then spent the rest of the replay driving into the wall at the side of the track. Occasionally the wheels would twitch from side to side to indicate corners that the car thought it was driving around. Weird!

I remember this happening with a replay in WipeOut 3 when I first got the game, but hadn’t seen it since.

It’s a bit of a shame, really – as the bug takes the shine off of an otherwise cracking game.

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Portfolio

Insight for Airbus

InsightThe Insight intranet site was my first intranet project for this client and was a resource of information on the development of a new aircraft.

Although not technically advanced, the site had to carry consistancy and usability due to the broad scope of user profiles – covering different languages and cultures.

The site contained technical information that had to be navigated quickly, so I used a DHTML drop down menu system that allowed users to jump to individual sections without having to follow a fixed path through other pages.

This site also had the unusual restriction of being targeted at Netscape’s 4.7 browser, as this was the standard browser installation across the company.

The site was challenging to work on, but fun too and feedback from the client was very positive: on hand-over I was told it was “the most technically accurate site they had ever taken delivery of.”

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Bookshelf

Professional PHP Programming

This is the book I’ve been using to put this site back together!

For anyone who’s gone as far as they can with HTML and JavaScript, PHP is probably the next step you should take. Unlike Cold Fusion from Allaire, it wont cost you thousands – it’s free and open source, and there are quite a few hosts out there who’ll provide it alongside a MySQL back end for you.

All you need is some basic SQL, of which the book contains plenty of examples, and you should be up and running in no time.

Wrox are starting to get quite a tidy range of manuals on the go to suit web professionals. I’mquite looking forward to their up coming WAP programming book. Until then the PHP should keep me busy and get this site working a bit better in addition!

Buy Wrox’s Professional PHP Programming from Amazon.co.uk

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