Xbox Avatars on your desktop

So last November Microsoft introduced the New Xbox Experience (NXE) and along with it, the addition of Avatars. Now we can have little digital versions of ourselves on our 360's. Additionally a few websites have made use of them as well (for example www.360voice.com displays your avatar on your Xbox's blog page).

I wanted to be able to check out the avatar's of some of my friends on XBL, and I thought it would be cool to have them on my desktop. From this, a Perl script for doing so was born.

For example, right now my desktop on my netbook looks like:


As you can see, the avatar's (and gamercards!) for 4 of my friends are drawn on my wallpaper. This script which started off so simple, has now become quite complex (as most programming projects do), and is quite versatile. You can now:

• Specify the number of columns of gamers (in the above screenshot this is set to 1, but you could have 2 or 3 or as many columns of avatar's and gamercards as you want)
• Set the opacity (transparency) of the avatar's so that you could have your background image partially show through.
• Have as many or as few gamers as you wish
• Change the card look by specifying a different base URL from MyGamerCard.net
• Output the image in 8 bit, 24 bit, or 32 bit colour depth
• Output the image as a PNG file or Windows BMP
• Only generate an image consisting of Avatars & gamercards or have them drawn on a suppplied background image (in GIF, JPEG or PNG format)
• Specify the width & height of avatar's and/or gamercards
• And much more
  

The script itself is written in Perl, and runs fine with v5.10.x of ActivePerl for Windows (if using older versions, you'll need to install the GD library as well). It is command-line driven and intended for relatively "advanced" users. For help:

perl genWall.pl -?

will show all the options. And lastly the script itself can be found at:

http://webhome.csc.uvic.ca/~aparkin/xbox/genWall.zip

And it is released under the conditions of the GNU Public License (GPL), so is free to use and modify as you see fit. Enjoy!

My streak is now done....

Well, I was on quite a roll this year, keeping a (I think) pretty impressive achievement streak going, but alas, as the cliche goes, all good things must come to an end. I'm currently away from home in the Kooteneys doing a combination of work and visiting family. I brought a 360 with me, but after the 9+ hour drive yesterday I didn't find the time to get any gaming in and as a result my 216 day achievement streak came to an end.

I really gotta tip my hat to people like Knuckles Dawson who did close to 2 solid years getting at least one achievement a day. That's incredible perseverance.

Oh well, maybe now I'll get that masters degree finished. :p

Some stats about my streak:

• Length: 216 days (Dec 31, 2007 to Aug 2, 2008)
• Total Gamerscore gained: 33,808
• Total Number of achievements: 1,475
• Number of Games 100% Completed during the streak: 23 (20 retail and 3 arcade)
  

And for the record, during my streak I also was doing full time studies at the University of Victoria working on my masters degree. I'm also married, to a wonderful woman who for some strange reason didn't divorce me even though I spent many an evening cursing at pixelated bad guys on the TV. I also taught in the months January to April. So yes, I did have a life while doing this.

Xbox Live Orientation

Came across this while watching the latest Sessler's Soapbox. It's a funny vid of a hypothetical Xbox Live Orienation, and it's gets everything just about completely bang on.

http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/videos/21418/Xbox_Live_Orientation.html