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In a recent CVG interview, David Braben talks about the next version of Elite. Confirmation that Elite IV (No better name exists publically yet) is not vapourware as some have been saying.

Obviously they’ve not been listening to David and the passion with which he speaks of a future Elite.

Elite will be Frontier’s next big next-gen game after the political thriller The Outsider ships. The Outsider is going to be a game that breaks a lot of new ground in gameplay and immersiveness, ideas and technology that is required to make Elite what Braben dreams it could be.

Also confirmed is that the next incarnation of Elite will be a single player game at first, with a small LAN based multiplayer element. Followed later, after more development and technical advances, by a proposed Massive Multiplayer Online version of the game. Something that a lot of Elite fans have been fantasising about for many years.

In a recent interview with CVG, Elite creator David Braben speaks of how he believes Sony got their decisions about the PS3 absolutely right.

There’s been plenty of bashing of Sony’s handling of the PS3 launch and little to be said from anyone in defence.

Braben though thinks differently:

“I’m very wary …at the moment there’s a fashion to knock Sony and I think it’s a big mistake. The fact that they have succeeded very well twice, they’re one of the few companies to have gone outside core gamers. Don’t write them off.”

Braben continues to express his belief that the choice to go with a completely open net access service, as opposed to a closed service such as Micosoft’s XBox Live, will be key to the PS3’s success.

“That shows a very different approach. It’s not a narrow gateway, highly controlled by one person. I think that is very very positive.”

He also believes that the PS3 should be considered more than a console.

“When you put it together with the fact that it supports a keyboard and things like that, people may start to regard it more as a cheap PC than an expensive console. Or a new thing that’s somewhere in between.”

Well it remains to be seen, but I respect the positive attitude. I’m going to a talk by Braben on Monday, I wonder if this will arise in the after lecture questions.

(updated below)

In the aftermath of changing to my new Cherry MX switched keyboard I have found myself missing the handy media buttons on the old membrane keyboard.

So I had a little google about (using google) and found the Griffin Technology AirClick USB. A handy little Human Interface Device, it has five buttons and a number of plugins that allow you to control various applications. Primarily I was interested in Winamp control, playing, pausing and changing tracks. I had a deeper look into it and one of the available plugins in Sean Wilson’s new version 2 software is a winamp plugin. Cool, so I bought one.

Works great. Until I went to change volume that is, it’s just too slow for my purposes.

In the release notes there is the following addition to the latest version mentioned:

Easier creation of additional Plugins using any .Net supporting language

Well fantastic, I can do that, perhaps I can write my own winamp plugin. Plenty of searching around their site later and there’s no help or info on doing any such thing. I emailed support and got back a plugin that used sendkeys to just send configurable keys to Windows. Not a lot of use if you happen to be typing at the time!

I found the developer of the Mac software and his blog. He’s posted ways to hack the Mac version, no go for PC though.

I then noticed that the .acp plugin files in AirClick’s plugin folder were just renamed .net 2.0 IL dlls so I emailed support again asking if there was any supporting source code for writing your own plugins.

While I was waiting for a response I had a quick fiddle with Lutz Roeder’s Reflector and Denis Bauer’s FileDisassembler plugin and generated a C# project from the winamp.acp plugin. It compiled with no trouble, so I renamed the .dll to .acp, dropped it in the pugins folder, restarted AirClick and everything worked. Fantastic. Now I can get on with hacking it.

A little bit of coding later and I’ve now got a volume control that smoothly accelerates from small changes to larger the longer you hold down a button.

Then the reply came back from support:

Unfortunately we do not have source code for the AirClick. This is info that doesn’t leave the doors of research and development.

Oh dear, really, well I’m screwed then.

*GRINS*

So top marks to Mr.Wilson and his code, but the usual non-technical nounce of the average support department proves to be a barrier yet again. Great product on the other hand.

Updated Information

I decided it was worth trying to contact Griffin again, so I penned a very similar email to the last one. This time I got a direct response from Sean Wilson, the creator of the PC AirClick software.

I have not written a formal SDK or Visual Studio template for writing

AirClick plugins yet, but I do have a txt file I wrote up real quick

to send to people who are interested in writing their own. I will

attach it with this email.  - Sean Wilson

Great stuff! So here’s a copy of that file for all you plugin makers.

Making Plugins