I had a long phone call yesterday evening with one of my buddies. He made a PC clone of the Playstation "Eye Toy" which is called "Camgoo". Normally it should hit the stores in Europe in september. I happened to play the game and it's really fun ! The best is that in one of the games, where you have to knock off some airplanes coming at some kind of king kong there's a little lady attached to the building... I've a little patch here to make her having a little less clothing on her ;)
My buddy has been at the games convention in germany which was a huge success. Unfortunately I couldn't be there although some of my mates asked me if I could pass by their booths. "Camgoo" has been shown at the BHV booth and appearently the setup was quite cool. They had a large pirate ship with a big screen. People had to step onto the ship to play the game.
The german game development rumor mill is turning and turning. After some people have "changed" their place to "consult the mother company on how to make internationally competitive games" (Teut Weidemann (Wings -> Soldner)) there are some discussion about whether yes or no Settler V is still a real Settler game. Some say yes, some say no... hardcore Settler players would rather take the 2 letter word. There are also some rumours about the release date. But I cannot tell anything about that because I have no confirmation about it from more than one or two sources. Nevertheless, they have only shown one level at the GC of Settler V which is quite few for a game that ideally should master in a month (worst case would be in november). I, for my part, would follow the tradition and say that the game comes out 3 month late ;)
Black Mouse Entertainment
That's the URL to watch out for in the next couple of days. "The Game" will be released soon. The latest release candidate has gone out last thursday and I haven't got any "You got bugs" mail since then. Fortunately I do not have to build a demo version for the game since the publisher can do it on his own. It seems that the demo has been handed out to the beta testers too and it works quite well.
Normally I had to go to a customer tomorrow but the date has been pushed back by one day. Best is that I don't have to get up earlier than the other days :)
I'm still doing a little research on NTP (Network Time Protocol). I'll implement it today and I'll see if it works.