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I had an idea a while back. I rented a van in Florida for our family vacation last year. Not sure if it was a good or bad thing but as the engine power would fluctuate it was noticeable that the blower speed fluctuated (like the battery was dead and the alternator was the only thing powering the blower).  Anyway it reminded me of a similar effect in a jet – since the cabin air is taken off a stage of the engine compression it would change the pressure and noise level in the cabin almost directly. Then I went to the Sigur Ros concert in Kansas City last Thursday and saw they were independently controlling incandescent lights on stage!  My friends at Phidgets led me to this article which lead me to Proportional SSR’s and voila!

Ah, but sadly Crydom recommends against using these for inductive (motor, transformer) loads.  Not sure why or what would happen so I bought one on eBay to experiment with.  In the event that my experiment goes horribly wrong:

Fortunately the blower motor that we are using has a tapped winding and I could switch between these three speeds using a standard AC SSR.

In other news, finished the forward bulkhead insulation and moved onto the starboard interior paneling.  That is ready to paint with the kids tonight!

These are all the lowest class or “scout” class vessels for each of the three factions.

Installed rigid foam insulation (1.5″) in the frontal area of the ship (design would not allow for more but it is a relatively small area).

I also worked on dressing up the swivel bracket (previously it was exposed lumber).

Finally, I fixed the “black” square issue… turns out a lot of my colors were off because I was using “char” instead of “unsigned char” to read them from the file.

Finally figured out how to just draw points using shader level 4.  A lot more pre-declaration than I am used to.  But it is exciting because I was able to get a VS and PS working and doing what I want… now I just have to get the GS up and running because apparently Microsoft deprecated point-sprites in DX11… and it is only showing up on one monitor!

I don’t have enough space to start working on starboard paneling so I started playing with the swivel mount for the gunner.

Still waiting for spring to start so I haven’t moved the trailer back to the front yard yet. Plenty of work to do but this is putting us into June to get the sheathing done for weatherization tests before electronics go in… and I was hoping to catch the April showers!

I think we have decided on the name of the new game and that it will be more of an MMOFPS than an MMORPG.  We are really focusing on the gameplay but also want to have a marked improvement in the graphics.

I am working on some calculations for the surface map (starting literally from the ground up on the graphics).  Turns out that you can start picking the ground up around 30 km which equates to a 600 km radius of ground data that has to be defined.  If we use level 7 data for Venus that gives us 3.41 pixels per km or 0.3 km per pixel resolution at 30 km.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqfQxUnUA8uGdDVmc290SmtjcUN4dGN0XzQ3QXgwSkE&usp=sharing

I came down with a cold late last night so I have been sitting at the computer for 8 hours today working on frustrum-related programming.  Some of the time was spent on our modelling tool called Makeship.  Some of the time was used to develop a spreadsheet which can be used to find an inner polygon given a three-dimensional polygon.  But most of the time was trying to figure out how to take the 8 vertices that I have yet to calculate and build a projection matrix.

Presumably it can be done since the matrix can store the information we need – but the math is apparently very complicated so we will have to accomplish it through multiple concatenations.

Another approach was to take the 6 planes that are described by the 8 vertices but that was shot down too.  I took an excerpt from this article:

… there’s a reason the Digital/VFX industry hasn’t done this already =)

Compared Ustream to Livestream and went with Ustream.  You can see the channel feed on the left above the archived content.  If we aren’t “live” you have access to previously recorded video.  Much easier than what I tried before!  I will basically leave it up and running 24/7 but send notifications through the channel of planned sessions and I will record those planned sessions.

The cameras I have are horrible.  The ones I bought on eBay have a 12 mm lens!  According to this calculator that means I am only getting a field of view (FOV) of 28 degrees!  So their claim that they are 60 degrees is just bogus.

In researching a good replacement I ended up buying the Genius F100.  It boasts a 120 degree field of view and 2 MP per frame at 30 FPS (required for HD video).  Should get it in a few days.  Another bonus is that it has a stereo microphone built in!

Kids helped me rough up the HDF with sandpaper. Then they helped me paint! It turned out nice and they didn’t make a mess.

My wife helped me find the material for creating a stencil and then even helped cut the plastic for me! This stencil is used for the screw locations since it is critical that I don’t drive a screw in the wrong spot or there goes an HD monitor!