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I have read conflicting reports of what the maximum visual range would be for pure air with no aerosol or humidity.

As you can see I got the geometry for the whole planet up and running as well as a pixel shader fog algorithm. The fog color is based on the zenith sRGB values from the Vanera spacecraft observations and varies with altitude.

Out of the 6 HD monitors that make up the display, only 2 were allowing me to use the FHD 1080p resolution. The other 4 were listed as “Generic Non-PnP Monitor” on the display properties.

I reached out to AMD (the graphics card manufacturer) and the DisplayPort to VGA adapter manufacturer (a Chinese company). After spending a lot of time messing with a ton of different suggestions from the manufacturers and on various forums, the problem turned out to be the VGA cables.

In a race to the bottom some of these cable manufacturers leave out expensive copper wire that they don’t think people will miss! The one that is missing in my case is the SDA (pin 12) which is apparently responsible for “plug and play” detection of the monitor’s capabilities.

Hopefully this will save you some time … swapping the cable out for one you know works is the easiest way to troubleshoot this IMHO. And if you buy cables you should either check for continuity through all 15 pins (and the chassis) or hook it up to make sure you have all the features you are expecting.

First, the sun rises in the west on Venus, not the east.

Venus rotates slower than any other planet in our solar system… 243 days. That is actually longer than it takes for Venus to revolve around the sun (the Venus year is 225 days). The net result is a solar day that lasts about 116.75 Earth days.

Fortunately for the gameplay we aren’t tethered to the surface and we are suspended in a medium that is moving, on average, 200 km/h. That cuts the day down to about 192 hours or almost exactly 8 Earth days.

So that means that the “magic hour” lasts about 8 hours but then we are in complete darkness for almost 4 days!

Campaign is LIVE on Indiegogo!

Please contribute (even if it is just $1) to help the campaign trend in the first few days next week. Thank you for all of your support!

Here is the t-shirt design my brother-in-law whipped up late last night.  You can get it at the $30 contribution level or higher.

Preliminary tests at almost 19 km above the surface.  The plate is about 148.5 km square.

Level 7 data is essentially a Mercator map that is 131072 x 65536 pixels. That comes out to 3.447 pixel per km.

The equatorial circumference is 38,026 km with no oblateneess – Venus rotates so slowly that it doesn’t bulge at the equator!

A proposal has been submitted by our friends at Triple-I to have the Dropship Simulator exhibit at Big Kansas City 2014.  Everyone keep their fingers crossed!

Finally got it!  It was a combination of OpenGL row-major vs. column-major and a lesser known difference between projection matrices (DirectX screen-space origin is top-left, OpenGL is bottom-left).

Such a relief for me – I have literally not been sleeping well … my dreams incorporate concatenations, negative signs, etc.  I actually read this lecture a while back but I didn’t focus on the differences between OpenGL and DirectX because I didn’t actually have a solution for either platform until very recently.

The latest work… working past some of the column-major vs. row-major matrix ordering and differences between left-hand and right-hand coordinate systems – brings back memories.

Wired up the Motion Control Unit (MCU) which does the start-up and shut-down sequences for me automatically and currently mimics the joystick motion.

I also got asynchronous email support wired up and fixed a couple glaring issues with multiple game controllers.  Still working out issues with the door device (processing multiple requests for open and close simultaneously).

Big shout out to Robert Kooima at LSU and CCT for his work on perspective projection. After about a week of failed attempts to derive the 6 different projection matrices needed for the view, I had a breakthrough last night and this evening.

I am beefing up the tools so that I can test this method in the actual simulator tomorrow. I think any seams that I currently see are hidden by the bezels of the monitors and the stenciled areas of the viewports.