I've been quiet on my blog recently, but very busy with a project. 

I have finally built my first VR game for Oculus Rift in Unreal Engine / C++.  It's a recycling game.  Grab items off the conveyor in and throw them into the right recycling bin: keep up your accuracy to keep playing as the conveyor gets faster.  

I had nearly completed the game at Christmas and was doing the final debugging when I made a mistake with my back up to github and corrupted the game and the back up.  I ended up having to redo all the Blueprints and got a long list of bugs.  

I've created a new page for Unreal Engine projects.  You can get the build and the source code and (in case you don't have Oculus) watch a video using the link below.​

I've spent my summer working on a virtual reality game in Unreal Engine / C++.  This one builds successfully (my 10 pin bowling VR game wouldn't build for some reason).  I've focused on making it as playable as possible.  I'm sorting out instructions and sound effects at the moment.  

I had a lovely time in London today at the BAFTA Young Game Designer finals, thank you Mel and colleagues.  Congratulations to all the winners, particularly Max Robinson who won my category with LASERASE: Demolition in the future.  There's always next year ...

I've been doing a Udemy course "Unreal Engine C++ Developer" (https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse/).  I finished the Battle Tank game today, which takes 121 lectures.  After my problems building an .exe of my bowling game, I was pleased that Battle Tank built successfully.  I like the Udemy course: it's good at getting you to write the code, has structured challenges and is kept updated.  There's another bit of the course, then I'll try another project of my own.  

I'm very excited to say that I won the TCS Oxford Computing Challenge, Junior (Years 6 and 7).

There were two rounds, with the top 20 going through to the final round.  I was quite nervous before the final round, but forgot about my nerves when I started doing the questions.

Thank you to my teachers for enabling me to do this.

I'm really excited that BAFTA have chosen Water the Crops as one of 10 games to take through to the finals in the BAFTA Young Game Designer - Game Making Award.   My game is featured at http://ygd.bafta.org/competition/competition-news/2019/water-the-crops.

I'm also enjoying playing the games written by the other finalists that are available at http://ygd.bafta.org/ygd-winners-and-finalists.

10 pin bowling is my first VR project for Oculus Rift.  It's also my first proper project in Unreal Engine / C++.  
I've been doing a Udemy course on Unreal Engine / C++ that's great and I wanted to do a project of my own as well as following the tutorials.  
The main bowling mechanic was very quick to make.  It took much longer to lift up the skittles that were still standing and sweep away the others.  Also the scoring took a long time.
I learnt to write the code in really small steps because if you make any errors in C++ the Unreal Editor crashes and you have to reload everything.  
I haven't sorted out packaging to make an .exe.  It builds with no errors, but crashes when I run it.  If I sort this out, I will upload the .exe.

I've created a machine learning page and added my first project.  It's a digit recognition program in Unity using a Dense network trained on the MNIST database using Keras / Tensorflow.  The main problem was exporting the trained model into Unity (which wouldn't work with a Convnet).  I'm going to see if I can do this with Unreal Engine.

I've finished 3 big projects in the last month, Water the Crops, Navigate and Where to Next?  I'm going to focus now on trying to learn something new, rather than just getting stuff out.  I'm planning to look at machine learning and Unreal Engine.

I've completed Where to Next? a project a worked on with my sister.  
​Where to Next? makes intelligent recommendations to travellers about where they should visit next. 
Users rank places they’ve visited.  Then we make intelligent recommendations by looking at other travellers who have given out similar rankings to the user. 
Data is input using a keyboard or voice recognition/text to speech (using a Google AIY kit), making it easy to use in places like Tourist Information Offices or railway stations, including by people with limited vision.
The code is on my Python/Other page 

I've made a prototype of an educational navigation simulator.  You have to steer a cargo ship into the dock at Southampton using a very small bit of a UK Hydrographic Office chart.  It's harder in the fog like in the second screenshot.  I made this at Taunton Coderdojo.  It was an idea from the coders who volunteer at the Coderdojo and work at the Hydrographic Office in Taunton.  It's been a rush to get the protoype ready for Coolest Projects in Manchester on 2 March.

I've debugged Water the Crops.  The camera was shaking during the harvest animation which took ages to solve (child of umbrellas crashing into umbrellas).  I've also added a number to show you what level you're on and tweaked the power and rain settings to make it more playable.  

I've now added levels to Water the Crops.  The screenshots show the tractor harvesting the potatoes.

After 8 months work, Water the Crops is nearly complete.  It's a 3D Unity game where you use the drone umbrellas to direct rainfall onto your potato crop.  Just the levels left to do.

I went to Unity headquarters in Brighton yesterday. I had a lovely day and learnt about coming up with a game concept and about shaders in shader-graph. I also learnt about what the people there do and they presented some interesting slides.  Big thanks to everyone at Unity for giving up their Saturday and to Mel at BAFTA YGD for organising!

I have now done the first fifty Project Euler questions and am up to 64.

I have made low poly textured rocks.

I made walls with evermotion.org/tutorials/show/9267/create-stone-wall-in-blender-tip-of-the-week

I have spent the last three weeks trying to make realistic  volumetric 3D clouds in Unity.
I found some free clouds that were not fluffy.
I made some volumetric clouds in Unity but could not make them fluffy.
I make some fluffy clouds in Blender with cloud generator (www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGdRJFPVEI) that would not go into Unity without losing their fluffyness.
Finally I found this excellent free cloud toy (assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/cloudstoy-35559).  As I didn't have the source code, I made a script that detected when the clouds were spawned and then added rain to them.
Next step: realistic looking dry stone walls.

I went to London to the BAFTA Young Games Designer finals and had an amazing time.  There was a fabulous ceremony and a really good talk by a developer.  It was so exciting!  I didn't win, but will have another go next year.  The winner in my category, Maggie by Harry Thurston, is really good.  You can download it from ygd.bafta.org/competition/competition-news/2018/maggie.

I'm really pleased and proud to have qualified for the final 10 with Penguin Peril in the Game Making Award: 10-14 years old.  
This is the BAFTA press release: http://www.bafta.org/media-centre/press-releases/ygd-finalists-announced-2018
And this is the BAFTA webpage page about Penguin Peril: http://ygd.bafta.org/competition/competition-news/2018/penguin-peril

I had to make a 2-3 minute video about the game, which is linked below
bafta_james_lindsay.mov

I have now finished modelling my first blender model, an umbrella. Blender is a free, well documented 3D editor www.blender.org/. I am using my umbrella in my 3D water the crops (I have made 2D versions in Scratch and Python arcade games).