Reuben and Joshua have spent the weekend building LEGO models they received for their eighth birthdays.
Reuben built Poe’s X-Wing Fighter (75102) while Joshua built Kylo Ren’s Command Shuttle (75104). And so that Isaac wouldn’t feel left out he received a wee silver Captain Phasma stormtrooper minifigure.
It took them pretty much all day, finishing just before bedtime.
A couple of days ago I searched online for a LEGO style guide. I was certain that I’d read somewhere that the LEGO Group recommends that you refer to their product as LEGO bricks rather than LEGOs.
I found it in their legal notice on copyrights, trademarks and unfair competition. But not before I stumbled upon this document.
This is the back page of the LEGOLAND Florida style guide 2010 which outlines the LEGOLAND brand, logos and identity.
Wait a minute, what’s the last bit of copy on that page? Isn’t it in Latin?
It sure is. It’s a jumbled up piece of Cicero that has been used by publishers since the 1500s as dummy text. It’s called lorem ipsum and is still used designers to demonstrate what the design would look like before the final copy has been completed. And often also missed by designers.
A few years ago I remember reading someone who advised against using lorem ipsum in favour of actual text, even very rough, first draft text. It’s good advice.
The image above is from the 2010 style guide. I also found the 2011 edition which looks exactly the same, which makes me think that it wasn’t an oversight but an example of the style guide in action. It did make me smile though.
This afternoon we had a visit from Isaac’s godfather, the fabulous Mike McQuaid. As we stood in my study watching the boys playing LEGO® Marvel™ SuperHeroes on my PC I remarked to Mike that I wished that there was an option to use both my monitors, rather than squeezing the two-player co-op onto one 1920 x 1080 screen.
Mike was pretty certain that should be possible and after a quick ‘google’ he unearthed information about NVIDIA® Surround, which “joins multiple displays into a single immersive viewing surface”, typically used for full-screen gaming or watching full-screen video. However, we soon discovered that it requires three displays and I have only one.
This evening, not taking no for an answer I did some internet searching of my own and discovered SoftTH which claims to do the same thing as NVIDIA® Surround but on any number of monitors regardless of whether their resolutions match or not, and so long as they are plugged into a PCI Express graphics card.
I read somewhere that configuration could be a bit cumbersome but it actually turned out to be fairly straightforward. The trickiest bit, to be honest, was locating the game files (see below).
We have quite a few LEGO games installed so I had to hunt around for their various locations within C:\Program Files (x86):
I have a fairly decent graphics card (NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 660) so this worked for each LEGO game I tried. I didn’t play each game for long so I couldn’t attest for how reliable this is played over hours, but I couldn’t see anything that might suggest that it wouldn’t. A few notes from my 30 minutes experience of this…
I discovered when returning to the games that if I had any other applications open on monitor two (I’m running Windows 8 here) then once SoftTH was running it still showed the taskbar.
My workaround was to right-click the taskbar before the game started and select “Auto-hide the taskbar” which slid it safely out of the way.
The first real niggle I had was when selecting a new character why does the game present the character table in such a squashed-up way?!
The same is true when both players change characters at the same time.
My second caveat is that as beautiful as the periphery scenery looks while playing, game play isn’t very sustainable if you are playing a single player game because your character stands right in the middle of the screen, and so is divided between the two monitors.
My last word of warning is more of a hunch than from experience: I imagine that certain pre-rendered cut screens throughout the game may display in a strange way as they are not optimized for such a wide screen.
UPDATE: Actually, the cut screens on the whole were okay. You do lose some detail as you’re essentially viewing them through a huge letterbox, but it’s mostly viewable.
UPDATE: One thing I’ve noticed is that targeting with certain objects is now a bit off with the double-screen set up. For example, on the opening level with Hulk and Iron Man you need to target a water cannon at Sandman: where you direct the cannon and where it actually sprays are two different locations. On the next level you need to target one of Captain America’s locks, but it’s near impossible to line it up properly without quickly nipping back to a 1920 x 1080, single-screen resolution.
On the whole, I was really impressed. It was simple to set up, with absolutely no configuration from me.
I’ll show this to the boys tomorrow and see what their verdict is: usable or not? Then I’ll report back.
I always loved LEGO® as a kid. I’ve often said that the LEGO Star Wars games pretty much sum up a large portion of my childhood: LEGO, Star Wars and computers.
I love the various LEGO games we have: LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga, LEGO Star Wars: The Clone Wars, LEGO The Lord of the Rings, and LEGO Batman 2. I love the handful of other LEGO movies we have (mostly Star Wars)… so this looks great.
I can’t wait. Neither can the children. Erm… that’s what I meant, obviously, Reuben and Joshua are so looking forward to this film. And me too. A bit.