That is indeed right, we have finished the assignment and it will be online as soon as possible.

I have to say i’m so proud of how this turned out, i would upload some of the images but i don’t want to spoil the masterpiece so i’ll leave you with a Sample we left out tutors.

League Of Extraordinary Tutors

I cannot claim ownership of this photo, my tutor Ben “Noii” Dalton took it and i’ve stolen borrowed it from his Flickr account, which you can find here http://www.flickr.com/photos/noii/ Cheers for everything Ben!

          I first applied to Leeds Met on the advice of my College tutor Pete.  He himself had been a student at Leeds Met and told me it was a good uni to go to.  Another reason is that I had friends in Leeds already and that one of my best friends Tom was also applying so I knew that if worst came to worst then I would at least know somebody and wouldn’t be alone, but this wasn’t the case.

          The course has been amazing I’ve learnt loads of new skills and if I’m brutally honest it’s all stuff I thought I wouldn’t be able to learn but all of the tutors have been really helpful and have been there if needed.  I have particularly enjoyed the graphics unit as I feel it is one of my strengths, I chose to do a fair portion of my work for this uni on Typography as it has been something that has interested me for a while now and I have always wanted to try m hand at it.  Also with this unit I got to do some photography which is another thing I am interested in but never really had a chance to do properly before.

          There are so many parts of this course that I have found good if I’m honest, it has surpassed my expectations, I have thoroughly enjoyed most of the units.  In fact the only uni that I haven’t enjoyed was the 3d Design unit, it wasn’t so much that I thought the unit was bad, it was more along the lines of that I had a lot of problems with the software.

          If I could go back in time and take the year over I would definitely plan my time better, planning has been the downfall of me for a while now, I’m just not a very organised person and it’s something I need to work on.  It’s not even that I leave everything to the last minute, I just tend to attempt to do too much at one time and get bogged down and lost under all the work so it comes out at a lower quality than I could produce if I paced myself and did the work in more manageable size chunks.

          I think that overall I have done quite well at Level 1 but if I want to excel then I will have to put in a lot of effort over the summer getting used to all of the software and techniques so I will be ready to tackle Level 2 head on.  This shouldn’t be too hard as I understand the basics for all of the software that we have used so far, I just think that to get a good grade at level 2 I will have to step up my game somewhat and do everything I can to the best of my ability using better organisational skills and hopefully having a better knowledge of the software I’ll be using.

While they were playing I noticed that all of the objects they created was done in 3Ds Max, which is the software that we learnt how to use earlier in the year. The textures which they had been applied to it had all been created by themselves in Photoshop, and then it was all put together in the Unreal Editor. The map was set out as a military camp with everything that you’d expect to be there in this kind of game; guns, buildings, armour and floor, and they did everything in only 7 weeks which impressed me as they have done a top quality job.

Game Play.

I didn’t play the game myself, I was more interested in the physics behind it but I did watch Tom and Slim play and from what I saw there was no problems with it. Saying that, all they had actually done was put their own skins on Unreal and polish it. The teams people of New World Disorder were talking about the weapons to me saying that they needed to turn some of the powers up and down because from what I saw the pistol was more powerful that the sniper. All in all I’d give them a high 4/5 because it worked perfectly with just the weaponry letting it down.

Design.

I was actually surprised by the standard of the design with this, this could have easily been a professional game and I wouldn’t have had any problems with it. I’m not too sure about what they’re doing for a back story as when we turned up the game was already running so as far as any of us could tell, you were just dropped off in this military camp and you were right in the action. One last thing I thought that they used the interface well, it showed armour, health and ammo and in a game like this there isn’t much more you need. I’d give this another 4/5 just the lack of a back story let it down for me.

3d Design

I cannot stress how good I thought the 3d work on this game was, it could have easily been the actual Unreal, but it was also finer points like adding things like Humvees or suck stuff as tables or chairs, they have really gone out of their way to make it look like a military camp and all of the textures really worked well to add to this and I can’t find anything wrong with it at all so I’m going to have to go with a 5/5 for this, and for that I applaud them.

Over All: 13/15 which is 8.6/10 so I’ll round this up to an even 9/10. I find this score fitting as this was the best project that we had seen all day.

Organisational skills.

These guys have effectively just gone out and arranged for 5 bands to play a gig and record an album and when you think of all of the planning involved there, studio time, venue, actually getting the bands at the right place at the right time is no easy feat.  They did note that they ran into some trouble with Cockpit who had misinformed them about the recording equipment they had, I don’t think that it’s something that you would check personally, if a venue tells you they have sufficient recording equipment then you shouldn’t doubt it, but they seemed to have worked around it. For this I’d give them 4/5.

Recording skills.

I had a brief listen to the studio album, and from what I heard they had done a good job.  Now I’m not going to claim I know loads about recording audio because I don’t.  In fact I know very little about it.  But to me it sounded as a studio album should sound, just like anything you’d pick off the shelf in any music store. Again I shall give them 4/5.

Video Skills

I caught some of the recording of the live gig that they did and I thought it could have been better quality, Cockpit doesn’t have the best lighting which would have hindered them a little but also the sound wasn’t too great as Cockpit is a Venue under a Railway Arch then it probably isn’t the best place for sound recording.  With this I see it as things out of their control that lowered the quality so I’ll give them a 3/5.

One last thing I’d like to note is the Website

This is more like it.  Finally something that I do know about, first I’ll start with what I do like about it.  I like the colour scheme and the back ground image looks well made, it just doesn’t look like it belongs on this site.  Now, the things I didn’t like. The whole site has this cut and paste feel to it, just like it’s been thrown together with not much consideration. You can only tell if a piece of text is a link when you hover over it and it changes colour, this also gives away that links have their own font, but still it’s the same colour as the body of text so it’s not noticeable at all. Saying this all the links do work, but some of the pages they lead to need some work, particularly the “About Us” page rather than give us information on Northern Prospect and what it’s aims are it tells up about the team members which is something I’d of put on a separate page.  The page about the Music for Relief page has a lot of information.  To be brutally honest, this is more what their About Us should have been like, only about their group and not the charity they are doing it for.  The videos page makes the massive mistake of displaying the videos itself, I think they’d of done a much better job had they arranged it into a list of the artists who have been recorded, then had sub categories of each song they played and linked to the videos from there.  I wasn’t going to be too harsh on them with the website as it isn’t something I could imagine music students getting behind.  That was until I saw this on their about me “Aswell as these skills Dave also has a broad understanding of IT. His skills in this department are Web page Design” because of this I’m only going to give them a 2/5

Overall that is 13/20 so 6.5/10 which I’ll round up to seven as they have done a good job here.

First off we have “Beholder”

We first spoke to the Beholder team because in all honestly aimlessly wondering around Ghandi Hall and we saw them and my first reaction was something along the lines of “what on earth is that”.  Beholder had made a Robotic Spider and as much as I was impressed that a team had made something physical I do have to point out that their Robotic Spider looked like something you’d find in a Year 7 woodwork class.  It was essentially a wooden box with six legs with a laptop and webcam placed inside it.  I do have to say, the idea of a team making physical object made up for its shoddy appearance.  We started talking to them and we got an idea of how the robot worked from one of the Beholder Teams-people, I say we got an idea of how it worked because simply, it didn’t.  OK so to say it didn’t work is a tad on the harsh side, all of their electronic work was working it was just a delay in delivery which stopped it being functional.  The micro-controller that they ordered to connect the legs to the laptop hadn’t arrived in time.

Well the robot was supposed to take a live feed of its’ environment through the webcam, which then is transferred to the laptop, where by magic, or science (whatever you believe in) a piece of software called RoboRealm then applies a few filters to the image, and uses that to calculate where any obstacles that are in its path are located. Once it knows where these obstacles are, the information travels through a micro controller into the servos which control the robots legs and then – I’m going to say – in theory (because it wasn’t proven to us) it can avid these objects as it casually strolls around.

Well I’ve gotten round to rating the Project.

For build quality I’d have to go with 1 out of 5 and that’s purely down to the fact that I’d feel like I was going to hell if I gave it a 0. Well I liked the idea, and they did build it. But so many things set it back. The legs failed to support the weight of the laptop properly and there were 6, now I’m no Rocket Scientist, but I’m fairly sure spiders have 8 legs? One last thing that set it back was looking nothing like a robot.  It looked like one of those things you get out of a “Build It Yourself” Magazine.

Technically I liked this project, the software they were using was all in working order and it was only the robots legs that weren’t in working order.  Unfortunately this was what their project was all about, a robot that can avoid things, without working legs it can’t do this.  I really would like to give this group a decent mark because not only did they had a good idea they were genuinely disappointed that the delivery of their micro processor had bee delayed, but when I think about it all they didn’t have anything they had done themselves to show, other than the webcam working.  I’d have to rate them 2 out of 5 here and though I would like to rate them higher, I feel that there wasn’t enough there to warrant it and you can’t rate something high on theory alone (Barr the special theory of relativity).

Final Rating: 3/10