Forza 2 now owns my life

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I would post a quick update.

I am still powering through with sitecore on my Quickflix project, and we are on I think the 11th or 12th concept for the redesign of the look and feel. It is a tough slog, but we're getting there.

With the Beta of Halo 3 closed, and my Guitar Hero 2 fanatasism reaching it's pinaccle, I felt a yearning for a new gaming experience. After tripping up in JB Hifi I purchased Forza Motorsport 2 for my Xbox 360 and I have found it to be (barring a few minor annoyances) the best racing sim I have ever played. The Wireless Racing Wheel I got to compliment it is the icing on the cake.

Some reviewers have claimed the graphics to be "bland", or "functional" and I would have to agree... to a level. They are best described as realistic. The cars look phenomenal, but the tracks are bland looking, mainly because we are used to looking at the over the top craziness that is the courses found on games such as Need for Speed or Project Gotham Racing. Playing deeper into Forza 2 rewards with more tracks, and some of these look beautiful. One track places you winding through a track covered over with orange leaved trees in Autumn and it just looks amazing.

But, this game is all about the simulation, and it does this perfectly. From the torque steer on front wheel drive buzz boxes to feeling the wheels loosen up when cresting over a hill, Forza 2 gets it all spot on when using the wheel. If you are playing with the controller, you are missing out on most of the experience.

It did give me quite a thrill when I bought my real life car in the game and found it handled perfectly like the real thing, right down to the change in handling putting wider tires on mine did.

The depth of this game is just amazing. I can spend hours tuning or tweaking my car, or just sit back and watch races currently on the go on Xbox Live. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what Forza 2 has to offer. As I take a few glorious of my cars in the game expect them to get posted on couch-review for your purusal.

Peace out.

Sitecore: Powerful but mystifying

My Quickflix project (codenamed: phoenix) is going well and working with SiteCore has proven to be a challenge in both the best and worst senses of the word.

Articles on the net seem to be a bit thin on the ground when it comes to some of the more advanced areas of the application and it is proving to be a bit of a struggle. While the API documentation is great, finding out what certain parameters mean and also how / if I can do things is proving to be difficult, often ending up with just going back to trial and error.

If anyone out there has any knowledge about the following, or can point me to some help that would be great:

Passing fields as parameters to renderings: is it possible? can you do it from within the content editor? I would like to have a rendering that allows the user to specify some values from fields in the template (like the background image to use) but not actually specify the value, just the field to grab.

Can I write Sitecore or ASP control references in XSLT templates and still have sitecore render them? This would be handy in some of the controls I am trying to build, otherwise I will have to build ASP controls and write a heap of logic behind them, rather than just parsing the XML.

So far I am pretty happy with SiteCore and I am enjoying trying to meld it into something that will be easy for the content managers to use, whilst still allowing a heap of flexibility in page layout and functionality. Baby steps.

Scooter whoopage

Yesterday I reamed myself on the scooter. I hit a patch of crap pavement at full speed and launched myself over the handle bars. I hit the ground pretty hard, but luckily my face was in the way to take most of the impact.

3 internal and 9 external stitches to my chin, and a potentially fractured hand and elbow later and I am back at work. I tried to power on through with my work on Quickflix's Project Phoenix yesterday but I had to head home for a lie down.

Today I get a couple of xrays to find out the damage to my right arm, and on Monday I head back to the docs for a check up.

Hasn't put me off riding though: I scooted to work and the doctors today, although riding was a little difficult with the busted up arm.

As for Phoenix: I should have the final style guide and touched up page layouts of the redesign ready for monday, although I have effectively lost a day and a half to the accident. The new site is, in my opinion, looking good and I can't wait to get cracking on the SiteCore implementation soon.

UPDATE: X-Rays are done, I've fractured my elbow and it has a haemarthrosis. Nice. Just waiting for the doc to get back to me on what to do from here.

Project Phoenix officially kicks off

The Quickflix office is alive with activity. Project Phoenix is now full steam ahead after a brief prep talk meeting this morning over coffee and muffins. While my portion of work has a name, we've still yet to come up with some decent project names for the other units. The remaining large portions of work to be named are the CRM implementation, the Allocation re-write, redevelopment of the financial systems, and redevelopment of our backoffice inventory tools (which we call "Director").

A little on Project Phoenix: At this point in time we've decided to use a third-party CMS application called SiteCore. We have quite a bit of experience with this CMS in house, however we've never done anything quite as big as Quickflix in it. We will be customising the actual CMS quite a bit to make it suit our needs, however it does save us writing alot of functions we would rather not have to deal with by providing them right out of the box (workflow, editors, pre-built tools, security etc). Right now I am in the process of setting up a virtual machine to use for development and training and it is a good learning exercise in setting up a SiteCore environment. The virtual machine will have Visual Studio 2005, SQL 2005, SiteCore 5.3 and the .net 2.0 framework all running on the Windows Server 2003 OS.

My goal by the end of this week is to be familiar with SiteCore enough to produce a prototype of the next Quickflix. Stay tuned for info if I can achieve this and any hurdles I come across.