Popfly Game Creator

The very talented Popfly team has created another interactive way people can create their own content: Game Creator.

Powered by Silvelright Game Creator lets anyone create fun/simple games that they can share with their friends and the world. To me this is not only a very fun toy to play with but also a very serious and important demonstration of Silverlight and its capabilities. Check it out for yourself:

• Popfly Game Creator
• Vide on using Popfly Game Creator

GTA IV: Video Preview

Even if you are not a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series I highly recommend checking out this video trailer. It is truly the most amazing graphical representations of my home town (NYC) I have ever seen: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33327.html

Warning: Some mature content in the video preview

Solaris Online - Early Alpha

One of my close friends is a very good software engineer in the financial sector. While his day job might be dealing with numbers he spends his nights working on a multi-player game written in Visual Basic 6.

Why VB6? While he is not married to Visual Basic 6 (out of all languages) he has made significant progress over the years working out DirectX issues, creating a physics engine, and working out a very fast networking component. Re-writing it all in another more modern language would be time consuming and at this point wasteful.

The game has finally hit enough stability that it is available for public download in early Alpha. Go download a copy and check it out for yourself!

Download the client at: http://www.solarisgame.com/

Notes

• Since this game is not really well know yet you will usually find multi-player working but the game void of people. Monday nights around 8pm is a good time though to catch a live test with the creator himself
• There is no patch warning, you should always uninstall the old version and reinstall the copy from the website before playing
• In the near future I will help my friend setup a blog and calendar for the game so things can be better coordinated

Google Earth has Flight Simulator?

Today I discovered a very interesting fact, Google Earth v4.2 and above has a built-in mini flight simulator. Here is the user guide link:

http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html

While this is far from a full-featured flight simulator its still a nice free toy and an interesting way to experience Google Earth.

As a Software Engineer it always fascinates me when a product is extended in this fashion since it shows a good level of code reusability and dedication by the development team. Great job Google Earth Team!

Note: Even though the users guide says you need to press CTRL-ALT-A to start the simulator I found that CTRL-A works instead. Try it for yourself.