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Overall it was our biggest success yet!

We operated continuously Saturday with only one power hiccup about half way through… someone on our block blew the fuse! Fortunately it was between rides so no one noticed a thing.

Overnight someone shut off our generator again… but we anticipated it this time and only had the air conditioners running to cool it down from the long day.

Sunday we were neck and neck with our Saturday performance (only trailing by one ride) until 2 PM when the flight stick was broken.

The damage looks like it was malicious but the CVVRs for the last 2 rides doesn’t show any vandalism. I am hoping to fix it rather than replace it since these run about $200. I am still not quite sure how they got the large square peg through a small round hole without damaging anything else.

The event was shut down early (just before 4 PM) due to approaching inclement weather so we technically would have only lost about 2 hours of revenue. However, the weather never actually came and they made us sit around until 5 PM before we could hook up the trailer and leave.

It turns out that some of these makers are actually paid by the Faire to participate and offer rides to all ticket holders. They were also allowed to pack up starting about 4:30 PM ahead of everyone else which seems unfair since we paid $200 for the booth.

I removed the “Advertising” section from the navigation and put an “FAQ” section between “About” and “Booking” to answer some common questions I get from prospective clients. Let me know if there is something else you think should be on there (or moved from another tab like “About” or “Booking”).

Paragalactic Attractions FAQ

The hard deck of the cloud base layer rendered here purely using shaders!

It uses a fullscreen quad which resembles the near plane of the viewing frustum which means the depth/stencil evaluation is worthless… so we have to do a painters’ algorithm to render the clouds before the models and terrain for proper sorting below the cloud layer.

I am pretty confident that this will preclude ships or structures from rendering correctly if the subject model is in the scud layer below the hard deck… but I have to work on the scud layer first before we will know what the effect is.

Finally made some headway yesterday and today on getting the frustum corner vectors properly computed and transformed. This preliminary pixel shader is showing the ray interception at 47 km (1km below the actual hard deck) where we will start our marching!

The quiltwork shows the level 7 panels that make up the clouds based on UV coordinates derived from the fractional remainders of the level 7 scale.

My oldest niece helped me prototype the gunner station this afternoon.

Based loosely on the limited views available of the movie prop:

I have been toying with the idea of raymarching the base of the cloud layer like:

Yesterday I was started working on getting the rendering of a fullscreen quad shader ready to accept pixel shader directives.

We are right at the lower limit (24 FPS) for the display program running a 6-head gaming card on a monster machine with just the terrain, atmospheric effects, and two copies of the same platform model.

I had a sneaky suspicion that rendering each viewport in its entirety during the “Render” method would be slower than sending all 6 projection matrices to the HLSL shaders and letting them split the geometry across viewports.

I am happy to provide some numbers now after this evening’s spike!  I applied this change just to the terrain and turned off the model rendering: 137 FPS before, 154 FPS after (a 13% increase in performance).

So, yes… it is faster. There is one big drawback… the shader wants to know how many vertices to expect coming out of the GS (I usually just run 1 viewport on my development machine).

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Geometry Shaders
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[maxvertexcount(18)]
void GS(triangle VSSceneOutMain In[3], inout TriangleStream TriStream)
{
GSSceneOutMain output = (GSSceneOutMain)0.0;

So it isn’t really worth doing right now… the bigger fish to fry is obviously the models rendering speed!

I have put on maybe 4 or 5 gallons of white paint ranging from $15 to $60 per gallon on the exterior of the Dropship in the past 3 years but I have high hopes for this Sherwin Williams product that I used for my latest coat.

It is thick. It is tenacious. It applied very evenly and dried quickly. If it is as durable in the elements as it claims then they have a customer for the long haul here – I will use it in all my outside projects!

Unfortunately, it appears to be exclusively at Lowe’s so I can’t show you price information but I paid about $45.