Above is the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicles (LEMV) which will be built for the US Army within 18 months and ready for operations by early 2012. It will cost £350m, with the contract awarded to American military contractor Northrop Grumman, one of the world's largest defence companies. It will be able to stay in the air for up to three weeks at a time and provide what designers describe as an "unblinking eye" of surveillance for forces on the ground, transmitting data without any delays. The skin is also made up of a mixture of tough materials and Kevlar, being able to withstand most small arms fire.
Using my love of comics as a reference point, I predict that it won't be long until we see fully fledged sky bases in our skies, like the Marvel Helicarrier (below). All I can say is bring on the Iron man armor suits. J!
I don't want this thread to be purely about computer games, and I am aware of what I said in my previous post about the PSP, but I feel I must tell this tale.
As I mentioned in my last post I recently went on hol with my wife, however we have very different ideas of what makes a great holiday, but as we only had a limited budget she had her wish and we went somewhere hot with a pool. I knew it would be great to spend some quality time together, but I did not want to just sit in the heat (honestly, like roasting a hog!) so I decided to invest in a PSP to take with me. I did not use it. I was too busy enjoying myself, so like all the others I had it was going to be traded in.
However, we came back to some bad news and I found myself having to spend an awful lot of time waiting around in hospitals, and this is where I found the real joy of the PSP. It wasn't in the games but in the fact that I loaded up my holiday photos on there to show my parents, I downloaded my music and films to keep me entertained, I also downloaded a few classic PS1 games, but best of all I found that it had a comic reader similar to the motion comics on i-Tunes, so for only £1.19 an issue I could also read my favorite comics (and you guys know how much I love my comics). All of these things I did on one small machine without inserting one UMD, amazing.
Now I also know most of you are screaming "Get an i-Phone, it does all those things!", but this was £99, and you can also get good UMD films and games rather cheaply. So it was just to say that the PSP is back in favor with me, and yes it is a good games console but its' extra features are also just as good and useful, especially when I didn't even mention built in Skype, radio, attachable camera, and GPS.
I just wanted to put out a post stating that I am still breathing and active, just had a real busy month, went away for one week but then had to go all around the UK, and spent a lot of time in hospitals (everything's fine now, I hope). Anyway that means that the time off I was going to take for planing projects has shifted to now so I won't be very active for the next month or so, but then you should check back for hopefully some cool new stuff.
The other major news from E3 for me is the 3DS. What can I say, the kings of handhelds, Nintendo, batting for another home run, I know where my money will be placed.
I can't really say a lot for this other than I remember when the original DS was announced, I looked at the stats, compared them against the PSP's, added the fact that the DS's biggest game was going to be an 9yr old 'Mario' game and believed that Sony had it in the bag. How wrong was I, the DS felt right to play, it was fresh, and appealed to everyone. Yes the PSP is more powerful, and yes there are some awful howlers on the DS, but any game that Nintendo touches is like pure gold.
So imagine a more powerful DS with bells and whistles on, and you have the 3DS, and with any worries about remakes of Zelda games etc on launch, I only have to remind my self of how wrong I was with 'Mario 64 DS' to enable me to place them to one side.
Ok, so E3 is in full swing, and being a massive gamer this is a very exciting time for me, more so than watching England play in the world cup.
I am not one of those gamers who only own one brand of console and feel the need to run down everything else on the market, nor am I the person who has each and every machine on the market. I prefer to own one for a period of time, play a few games on it, then swap to another if there are platform exclusive titles which appeal to me. Having said that, the current gen of consoles have now been out for a number of years, and as of last sept I have stuck with my slim PS3, with no plans of changing it any time soon. On a side note it is worth mentioning that, yes I do change consoles, but with each of the past generations I have found myself settling on the Playstation, so you could call it my favourite.
When the PS3 was launched though, I had no interest in it. I thought it was too expensive, nowhere near enough decent games to swap from my 360, and it felt a bit 'borrowed' from other consoles. But like the PS2 before, after a year it hit its stride, and with games like 'MGS4' and 'Little Big Planet' how could I not get one.
All this leads me on to 'Playstation Move'. When I first heard about it, I along with millions of others thought, "they've done it again, they've copied another company", and of course I am referring to the Wii, and by "copying again" I mean the achievements system on the 360. However just like the achievement system on the 360, Playstation copied it with their 'Trophies' and in my opinion improved it. The same must be said for the 'Move' controllers. Yes they are an extra expense, but most of you will already own the camera, and by being able to use the DualShock controller with most games as well, the cost isn't as high as first was thought. Bundle this with the first wave of games coming out like 'SOCOM 4' and 'Heros on the Move' and suddenly it becomes an affordable essential.
Finally I leave you with the thought of, if this is what they are achieving now, what will be happening in two years when developers put their knowledge together with the one-to-one tracking of 'Move' and the pure grunt of the PS3?
Just wanted to write this quick post incase anyone is following this blog and wonders why the input has significantly dropped of late. Well, believe it or not the more time off I have like now, the harder I find it to achieve things, weird I know, think it has to do with self doubt and over thinking. Anyway, I do have some ideas, but I am more of a pen and paper guy for the early stages of production, so you may not see anything appearing for the next couple of months, but then hopefully, bam, a new design with lots of cool things should rapidly start to appear, so don't give up, give me time.
Also I am creating a new thread to my blog entitled 'Cool Stuff' as I am a self confessed geek, and I constantly see things I think are cool, but my wife has given up listening and caring so I am sharing it here instead.
After browsing Twitter for new people to follow, I noticed some people had avatars which were animated. I was confused at first as Twitter only allows you to upload one pic as your profile picture, so how could you have an animation?
After searching around the internet I discovered that by using Photoshop you could save a series of images as a .gif or .png file, and use that as a single picture file.
To create an animated avatar simply open Photoshop and have a single layer for each complete frame of the animation, select each layer (using the shift key to select multiple frames), then with all frames selected go up to the 'window' tab on the main bar and select 'animation' from the drop down menu. A single frame (layer 1) should appear on the left side of the box which has just appeared. In the top right of the animation window box, click to open the drop down menu, and select the option 'make frames from layers', now each frame should appear individually across that box (like the original image which appeared when you first opened the animation window). The final step is to change the timings for each frame from the drop down box under each frame. Once complete you test with the play controls on the bottom left of the animation window, then when you are happy with the results, save for web like a normal gif, BUT make sure that the 'looping options' are set to 'forever' before you click the final save button.
You now have an animated .gif file which you can use, however Twitter have since stopped you from uploading animated gifs to their site, only originals now exist. As this was the reason for me to create mine I know have to figure out what I intend to do with it now, as I feel it is too good to just sit here, even if I do say so myself. J!
(Please note that the animation doesn't work on this site, this post is a copy from my main blog hosted on my main site)
