Only a bit late...
So what’s new… feels like a lot, but at the same time, not very much…
Things having been moving pretty faster over at the office - we almost have the dashboard polished off for the genie boomlift! There are still a few bugs to work out, but its much improved from last week where we got a crippled board back for a demo when we’d sent it in for only a minor tweaking. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but the likely culprits were that or hardware engineer working on the project either did one or many of the follow: static shocking the chip, removing one too many wires, or de-calibrating the joysticks. After talking to him today, its looking more likely that he has a 400khz chip connected to a 4Mhz chip, and that this is not a good thing… though the above are still possible contributors to the problem.
I had a meeting with Czarik and the CNS virtual reality guys at the university here… that was interesting. I’m bit annoyed that Czarik is calling me the ‘student’ helping him on the research - I politely put knocked that down a bit as the truth is I’m more doing Czarik a favor, borrowing from two pools of software he normally wouldn’t have access to. Anyways, the exciting part of the meeting is finding how far back our universities virtual reality system is; the machine from their ‘cave’ is 8 years old, and what they can publish in such a setting is abominable… literally, think video games from 98 but less so. I’ve said several times that the VR industry has their head stuck up their ass and is perpetually stuck in 95 [while the games industry is light-years ahead fueled by a multi billion dollar arms race] - I guess I was off… their actually LITERALLY stuck in 1998, and can’t seem to understand that the technology they are using is painfully out of date… no matter what they might have paid for it originally. I suppose the academic structure is not prepared for the explosive rounds of obsolescence seen in technology, but it’s not like these are million dollar iterations any more… I could build a machine dozens of times faster than what they have using off the shelf components and less than $2000… no sympathy.
570 is coming together - I’m still having a lot of difficulty with the group [Christine keeps getting depressed about the project and reaching for the abort key, while Scott is just a yes-man who bends the way of whoever talked to him last]. I hate group work when it is more of a battle, without them offering any suggestions or solutions for improvement, all the while being negative and difficult. *Shrug* at least we managed to come to a decent solution, and the material has been cut, so we’re past the point of no return; shall be interesting to see how they work out in finishing things off.
I also have my Christmas presents planned out for the family - nifty little bit of carpentry, which is what my Brother’s been doing the last couple of years. I think Dad really wanted me to do little projects in the shop with him, but there was always too much friction… but as I do still have access to the ID shop here are the university, I might as well use it, so I’ve got a nice big board of cherry and am going to try and turn it into useable parts this afternoon. I realize that Dad’s shop is probably better equipped [which is kind of sad] but at the same time, I’d MUCH rather work in a mellow and joking environment than one that’s high stress and like walking on eggshells. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
On the work side, things have been coming together. We’ve had a lot of demos and there’s a lot of interest in our industrial simulators. We’ve officially finished version 1.0 and are now expanding things for less of a sandbox and more of a trainee centric solution. We have a meeting with a fellow from CAT / Finning - who has experience with CAT’s large industrial simulators… he had a lot of good things to say, but its interesting that the meeting started with a “we’ve seen this sort of thing before” to a “I can’t believe yours looks so good / you can do that so quickly!”. Our competition is apparently an engineering PHD’ own small company that has excellent realistic simulation in really limited environments; you never leave the cockpit, and the environment looks like ASS. Seriously - they’ve been refining the same software for 20 years, which means that this really looks like mid 90s 3d, and poorly implemented even there. PureLight really caught our contacts eye [and the general grade of visual quality, though ironically that parts about to take a big jump as we’re prepping the industrial site for a major revision] - but what he really liked was the speed. In 5 months we’ve put together a complete product from scratch, and can potentially publish another similar machine in less than 30 days… which is big, as currently, they’d love to simulate anything but by the time they get a simulation back, the machine in question is already 3 revisions ahead. We’re also surprised at how much he liked the ‘outside the vehicle part’ - which is directly taken from gaming…. Apparently this is completely new and innovating, though at the same they’ve apparently played very little GTA. Anyways, an interesting and encouraging meeting discussing how we’re different from the competition, and we’ll see if it leads to any business in the future.
We’re also officially doing work with the Calgary war museum! Will be very exciting; they have a number of… I guess I’d say ‘choose your own adventure’ situations rather than ‘video games’, but either way, small but very interesting and emotionally loaded snippets dealing with Canada’s involvement in WII. Should be a very fun project, though what they’ve asked for is significantly bigger than what we can build for the mere 40 grand they have to offer. None the less, should be a lot of fun, and when the renovation to the museum opens in 10 months, the Queen herself is going to cut the ribbon!
Other office related news; we’re officially stating to build a gaming library, for “research”! I get to go out and buy a copy of HalfLife2 and some other titles, and by the end of the week we should have an Xbox360. Should make Friday afternoons / lunch hours waaay more exciting. [Update: going out to get said Xbox shortly, already have a few PC Games, and looking forward to Gears Of War Fridays…]
I think that pretty much sums it up; its been busy and productive, but I doubt you want to hear about my work on UV2 [now finished!] or experiments on PureLight. [Though I may show some screenshots later]….
…
And once again I’ve forgot to post this when I got internet access back [the Design studio is conspicuously non-wireless]. Anyways, interesting tidbit since then; was contracted by a number of my classmates to help them with their renders for a presentation this Friday. Made a relatively easy pile of $, learned a few ore rendering tricks, rediscovered my hate for Rhino generated models… but the tidbit is the reaction to my work with these guys; I appreciate how happy they are with the results, but I’m amused greatly that the average reaction [from people outside their group] is: “You’rae getting Andrew to help you on your renders? You bastards!” - yay for being the Ace in the digital rendering hole!
The other interesting little tidbit since - The ArtH course that I hate so very very much? Well, I still hate it, I still have no respect for course content or professor, BUT, I’m no longer afraid of failing the damn thing! We got the midterm back; probably my worst exam since Calculus = B+. He gives insanely hard exams, but he also marks WAAAAY too easy - which I’m definitely not complaining about! The fact that the class since said midterm has really lit a fire under my ass is also nothing to complain about; I’m about twice as comfortable with the course material for the final as I was for the material at the midterm. W00t!
Things having been moving pretty faster over at the office - we almost have the dashboard polished off for the genie boomlift! There are still a few bugs to work out, but its much improved from last week where we got a crippled board back for a demo when we’d sent it in for only a minor tweaking. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but the likely culprits were that or hardware engineer working on the project either did one or many of the follow: static shocking the chip, removing one too many wires, or de-calibrating the joysticks. After talking to him today, its looking more likely that he has a 400khz chip connected to a 4Mhz chip, and that this is not a good thing… though the above are still possible contributors to the problem.
I had a meeting with Czarik and the CNS virtual reality guys at the university here… that was interesting. I’m bit annoyed that Czarik is calling me the ‘student’ helping him on the research - I politely put knocked that down a bit as the truth is I’m more doing Czarik a favor, borrowing from two pools of software he normally wouldn’t have access to. Anyways, the exciting part of the meeting is finding how far back our universities virtual reality system is; the machine from their ‘cave’ is 8 years old, and what they can publish in such a setting is abominable… literally, think video games from 98 but less so. I’ve said several times that the VR industry has their head stuck up their ass and is perpetually stuck in 95 [while the games industry is light-years ahead fueled by a multi billion dollar arms race] - I guess I was off… their actually LITERALLY stuck in 1998, and can’t seem to understand that the technology they are using is painfully out of date… no matter what they might have paid for it originally. I suppose the academic structure is not prepared for the explosive rounds of obsolescence seen in technology, but it’s not like these are million dollar iterations any more… I could build a machine dozens of times faster than what they have using off the shelf components and less than $2000… no sympathy.
570 is coming together - I’m still having a lot of difficulty with the group [Christine keeps getting depressed about the project and reaching for the abort key, while Scott is just a yes-man who bends the way of whoever talked to him last]. I hate group work when it is more of a battle, without them offering any suggestions or solutions for improvement, all the while being negative and difficult. *Shrug* at least we managed to come to a decent solution, and the material has been cut, so we’re past the point of no return; shall be interesting to see how they work out in finishing things off.
I also have my Christmas presents planned out for the family - nifty little bit of carpentry, which is what my Brother’s been doing the last couple of years. I think Dad really wanted me to do little projects in the shop with him, but there was always too much friction… but as I do still have access to the ID shop here are the university, I might as well use it, so I’ve got a nice big board of cherry and am going to try and turn it into useable parts this afternoon. I realize that Dad’s shop is probably better equipped [which is kind of sad] but at the same time, I’d MUCH rather work in a mellow and joking environment than one that’s high stress and like walking on eggshells. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
On the work side, things have been coming together. We’ve had a lot of demos and there’s a lot of interest in our industrial simulators. We’ve officially finished version 1.0 and are now expanding things for less of a sandbox and more of a trainee centric solution. We have a meeting with a fellow from CAT / Finning - who has experience with CAT’s large industrial simulators… he had a lot of good things to say, but its interesting that the meeting started with a “we’ve seen this sort of thing before” to a “I can’t believe yours looks so good / you can do that so quickly!”. Our competition is apparently an engineering PHD’ own small company that has excellent realistic simulation in really limited environments; you never leave the cockpit, and the environment looks like ASS. Seriously - they’ve been refining the same software for 20 years, which means that this really looks like mid 90s 3d, and poorly implemented even there. PureLight really caught our contacts eye [and the general grade of visual quality, though ironically that parts about to take a big jump as we’re prepping the industrial site for a major revision] - but what he really liked was the speed. In 5 months we’ve put together a complete product from scratch, and can potentially publish another similar machine in less than 30 days… which is big, as currently, they’d love to simulate anything but by the time they get a simulation back, the machine in question is already 3 revisions ahead. We’re also surprised at how much he liked the ‘outside the vehicle part’ - which is directly taken from gaming…. Apparently this is completely new and innovating, though at the same they’ve apparently played very little GTA. Anyways, an interesting and encouraging meeting discussing how we’re different from the competition, and we’ll see if it leads to any business in the future.
We’re also officially doing work with the Calgary war museum! Will be very exciting; they have a number of… I guess I’d say ‘choose your own adventure’ situations rather than ‘video games’, but either way, small but very interesting and emotionally loaded snippets dealing with Canada’s involvement in WII. Should be a very fun project, though what they’ve asked for is significantly bigger than what we can build for the mere 40 grand they have to offer. None the less, should be a lot of fun, and when the renovation to the museum opens in 10 months, the Queen herself is going to cut the ribbon!
Other office related news; we’re officially stating to build a gaming library, for “research”! I get to go out and buy a copy of HalfLife2 and some other titles, and by the end of the week we should have an Xbox360. Should make Friday afternoons / lunch hours waaay more exciting. [Update: going out to get said Xbox shortly, already have a few PC Games, and looking forward to Gears Of War Fridays…]
I think that pretty much sums it up; its been busy and productive, but I doubt you want to hear about my work on UV2 [now finished!] or experiments on PureLight. [Though I may show some screenshots later]….
…
And once again I’ve forgot to post this when I got internet access back [the Design studio is conspicuously non-wireless]. Anyways, interesting tidbit since then; was contracted by a number of my classmates to help them with their renders for a presentation this Friday. Made a relatively easy pile of $, learned a few ore rendering tricks, rediscovered my hate for Rhino generated models… but the tidbit is the reaction to my work with these guys; I appreciate how happy they are with the results, but I’m amused greatly that the average reaction [from people outside their group] is: “You’rae getting Andrew to help you on your renders? You bastards!” - yay for being the Ace in the digital rendering hole!
The other interesting little tidbit since - The ArtH course that I hate so very very much? Well, I still hate it, I still have no respect for course content or professor, BUT, I’m no longer afraid of failing the damn thing! We got the midterm back; probably my worst exam since Calculus = B+. He gives insanely hard exams, but he also marks WAAAAY too easy - which I’m definitely not complaining about! The fact that the class since said midterm has really lit a fire under my ass is also nothing to complain about; I’m about twice as comfortable with the course material for the final as I was for the material at the midterm. W00t!