turbo2256b

iTrader: (1)

Just wire a mechanical bull into the app and go

glassdave

iTrader: (1)

physics look great . . . . except i think the guy would've flown out



it does have a realistic look to it. I see a little chine walk and the blow over was pretty convincing.

Todd Wasson

A few people have mentioned motion simulators. That would indeed be fun. One guy that has a really nice motion simulator asked to get on a mailing list so he can buy this when it comes out. I must admit it would be really neat to try it on that. I'm not totally sure about the software end of it though, what exactly I'd need to do to make it work.

Guy flying out: Oh yeah, there's no way he'd stick to the seat like that. Maybe if time permits I can try to turn him into a rag doll that gets tossed out when appropriate. That'd be fun.

Todd Wasson

Showing off the new instrument panel and some of the dynamics resulting from extreme engine trim and jack plate adjustments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wphpfF3kQn8&feature=youtu.be

SC288

Really like the changes made.....looks awesome!!!

502ss

iTrader: (3)

It's coming! Looking good!

SinOjos

Todd Wasson,

Great to see someone working towards a boating simulator. But my first reaction when visiting your website was, sigh.... Simply due to seeing DirectX11 being used rather than openGL. You may want to rethink using directx11, though you are probably so ingrained in directx11, you have no desire to re-code. I am sure there is no need to discuss the merits of the two with you, but here is a link for others that may not be familiar with the two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...L_and_Direct3D

The below is based on my 34 years of PC gaming as a user, and 20 years of Linux development for professional and personal use. It is rather lengthy, but you should consider what is happening in the developing world beyond M$. There is a major shift going on right now. Due to the progress and proliferation of the Arm processor and Arm based SOC's, GPU's, etc, in other words, singleboard arm devices. M$ like when 64 bit Amd processors came out, is far behind Linux, when it comes to the Arm architecture support.

The Arm architecture due to its lower cost to manufacture is most probably eventually going to replace the X86 architecture for the average computer user. It already has, with smart phones and tablets. But it will also, in the desktop area, and is already used for gaming on the smaller devices, and might eventually replace current X86 architecture gaming based machines. As Arm device manufacturing numbers increases, cost will decrease, while X86 architecture manufacturing decreases, due to lower demand, cost will increase. It is probably safe to say, that X86, or more specifically Amd_x86 (64bit) will not disappear, while X86_128bit may/will eventually appear. Though, as the Arm architecture capability approaches the current level of the X86 architecture, Arm due to the lower cost to manufacture will most probably replace X86 for the majority of end users. In many cases, it already has.

If you want to offer your product to the largest number potential customers world wide, you need to go openGL. Steam is finally releasing the Steam Machines, which uses the SteamOS which is Linux of course. While the user numbers on Steam shows that the games that are Linux/Mac/Win capable have the most users, by a wide margin. You should not discount the Linux user base. There is a far larger Linux base than most people think, in the US, while the percentages are much higher outside of the US. People around the world are shying away from supporting US companies like M$. If you do not know why, ask Snowden.

Nintendo, has reversed their decision to only design for their hardware platform only. They have taken notice of the proliferation of cheap Arm gaming devices. It makes sense to develop in a manner that works for all platforms. People cannot be expected to purchase multiple different devices when everything can be done on one. Even though the Arm32 architecture currently is not powerful enough for the most demanding games, Arm64 will eventually. Not to mention that the GPU capability is more important than the CPU in the most taxing games. GPU development for Arm devices is progressing at a rapid pace. I doubt X86 and Amd_X86 will be going away any time soon, and may even see 128 bit in time. For those that are not aware, X86 denotes 32 bit, while Amd_X86 denotes 64 bit. Amd produced the first 64 bit processor long before Intel, hence the naming convention in Linux. Which was 64 bit capable long before anything by M$. But by using openGL rather than directX11, it matters not what OS the end user uses.

M$ has renewed/redoubled their effort to produce an Arm OS, due to the popularity of the Raspberry PI, they were losing future programmers. They kept the boat from sinking on the 64 bit release by Amd and Linux, but this time they have not been able to stop Arm devices from being put on the shelves like they did with Amd64 bit computers with Linux. Linux has gained the traction with the average user that M$ and Apple has worked so hard to stop.

Never the less, Linux has traction that is not going away, the majority of all Arm singleboard development is Linux with Apple in a distant second, and M$ just finally showing up. The most creative stuff is coming out of Open Source, with hundreds of millions of people developing and contributing. Old standard corporate structures simply cannot compete on the same level, they may be able to provide for a select few, but cannot do so for the masses. No one corporation can hire a work force as large as the Linux world wide work force. Statistics shows that as much as 78% of all small devices run Android, Linux. People are installing Linux in nearly all flavors, as well as Android, on Arm singleboards for media-servers, as desktops, for home controlling, as well as a myriad of projects that the big corporation never thought of or allowed. While eventually as Arm64 comes about and processing power increases, desktops will be supplanted by peoples phones. No point to have a phone and a desktop when the phone can do everything the desktop does, dock it and use any monitor, keyboard, mouse, trackball you want. Have everything with you were ever you go.

The Steam Streaming will also change how things are done with gaming. Rather than having to purchase a dedicated gaming machine for every child/person in the house. One Steam Machine can do the heavy lifting with games being streamed to less capable devices attached to any monitor/tv in the house. Obviously reducing the household cost for providing for the more cpu/gpu intensive games that actually need dedicated gaming resources. Like all things, after the more creative finally prove the masses of so called experts wrong, the rest will follow.

Steam is not the only company working on streaming games. There is work on using Amazon AWS servers to do the heavy lifting then stream the processed content to end users on devices that are incapable of running a cpu/gpu intensive game. In other words, run a game that you now have to run on your $2,000 dedicated gaming machine, on your $600 smart phone attached to your computer monitor, keyboard, trackball/mouse or your 65 inch tv. The goal is to get to that sweet spot of current gaming platforms price point, $200-$400 dollars yet running games that currently need a $1,000 -$2,000 dedicated gaming machine. Simply put, more people can afford a $300 device than a $1,500 one. Put that into the context of 2-4 child household, that is a substantial difference.

I am currently doing a lot of work with many of the new Arm singleboards. We are replacing x86, architecture devices with Arm singleboard devices, due to lower cost, lower power consumption, lower replacement/upgrade cost. For everything from small servers to multi-media devices, in business environments, were a small location device makes more sense than using a server on Amazon AWS, or typical higher cost X86 server. It will not be long till Arm singleboards start replacing X86 desktops. The singleboard devices are perfect for use for controlling things in a computer driven home. Lower cost, less power consumption, less heat, less space, some are literally the size of a credit card. The big little endian devices are going to be replacing desktops. Which comprise of multi core larger cpu's working in conjunction with multi core smaller cpu's that switch with frequency scaling as load and resource needs change. Using the little cores when sitting idle or doing little work like writing a letter or email, but crank up the bigger cores for multi-media and gaming use.

Things are moving along very fast, while the stable kernel version for Arm is nearly to the x86 stable level. The hold up has been getting all the new SOC and board drivers debugged, combined with a lot of up and coming developer/manufactures, that lack Linux experience, and do not follow proper guidelines for interacting with upstream developers. Like Linus_Torvalds the lead kernel maintainer, and the hardware manufactures themselves. Hence the busy schedule causes those that that do not follow simple guidelines, to be ignored. Some of it is simply the language barrier, a lot is coming out of China, but they are learning English fast.

The Raspberry Pi http://www.raspberrypi.org/, really kicked things off. The primary goal of the Raspberry Pi was to produce a cheap computer ($35) so kids can start learning to code. Of course it is primarily directed towards gaming, games are the first things kids do with computers, but the developers never envisioned all the uses that have been applied to the Raspberry PI. The RaspBerry Pi really started a snowballing affect of cheap Arm singleboard computers. They thought they might sell 20,000, they have sold 3 million and climbing, while millions of other more capable arm singleboards have been manufactured and sold. The Raspberry Pi, helped the market to be realized.

I have been building custom OS's based on the Linux kernel for the past 20 years. Gentoo is by far the best for development due to it being a compiling flavor with a package manager (portage) that allows for easy compilation flag settings. It is the certainly the best for cross compiling in development setups. Many developers, NASA, many big universities, corporations, etc. all over the world use Gentoo, or a different flavor of Linux. Most people do not realize, the Internet runs on Linux, as do the majority of servers, your cars and boats computer is Linux, though some have a M$ sound system, but the engine controllers are all Linux, as well as 98.2% of the top 500 supercomputers. There is one lone M$ supercomputer. That alone says everything. http://www.top500.org/statistics/list/

SinOjos

Had to spit due to limit constraints.

I am simply attempting to point out, that by sticking to directX11, the largest portion of the current and future user base, is being ignored. The SteamOS and Steam Machines, is finally going to push more game developers to start developing for cross platform use. Nearly ALL of the open source developers that developed initially for Linux, have developed for cross platform use, their products are available on Linux, Mac and M$. There is simply no reason for game developers to not do the same, unless of course they have signed one of those non-disclosure agreements with M$ that stops them from developing for other platforms, to get cheaper support from M$. The way M$ has handled access to API's has been a big issue with the EU, which brought forth the million dollar a day fine against M$. Not to mention that nearly all of professional graphics is done with openGL (the graphics you see in movies), due to the greater performance and the open architecture. Not being forced under the thumb of one corporation has many benefits.

M$'s hard fought monopoly in the gaming arena is falling by the wayside. The demand for games on Linux is high, simply visit any Linux flavor forums, and you will find tens of thousands of complaints and wishes for game developers to start developing for other than M$. My personal experience, is that playing the same game on Linux on the same machine, dual boot, the Linux always plays better with higher FPS.

To get a better idea of were it is all going. I suggest taking a look at the resources and communities that have developed due to the actual manufactures of the new CPU's and GPU's, it is not just AMD and Intel any longer. The below are the most common of the Arm manufactures, and of course is but a short list, while there is no need to include AMD, Nvidia, Intel, everyone knows them. I am currently working with single boards, SOC's, CPU's. GPU's from all the below, doing development and subsequently bug testing/quashing. In the process of writing up some how-to's for the Gentoo wiki, for the less experienced to get up and running with some of the most common arm singleboards, just to give back a bit to the Linux community.

http://www.freescale.com/
http://www.ti.com/
http://www.allwinnertech.com/en/
http://www.broadcom.com/
http://www.amlogic.com/
http://www.marvell.com/
http://www.xilinx.com/

Todd Wasson

That's quite a lot of information, thanks. I haven't read all of it just yet, but the thrust of it seems to be about switching to OpenGL instead of DirectX.

I've been a simulation developer since about 2000 and was using OpenGL for my own graphics engines until pretty recently, so you're somewhat preaching to the choir here. I found it much easier to code with OpenGL than DirectX. But here's the thing: The boat simulator is using Unity3D which is an existing engine similar to the Unreal Engine (it's a competitor's product). In short, I didn't have to write the graphics engine for this, I just use what Unity provides. I do in fact use a little bit of OpenGL in the boat simulator to draw force vectors and so forth.

If Unity decides to switch over to OpenGL, from my perspective as a Unity user it would be transparent, so I'll let them make the decisions based on information like you've provided. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but there are estimates that about half of game developers are using Unity these days. It supports something like 21 different platforms including X-Box, Playstation, Android, etc.. How they do that is beyond me, it's all under the hood. Perhaps it switches to OpenGL for some platforms, I really don't know.

In Unity the only way to use compute shaders (the GPU programming you're talking about, see my channel for real time engine simulations that I wrote using compute shaders) is to use DirectX11 because the compute shader stuff is built on DirectCompute using HLSL. OpenGL won't do for that, and I'm not about to try to bypass Unity's graphics engine and write my own to replace it. That kind of defeats the purpose of using an existing engine.

Before I started working on the boat simulation in late 2014, I was the physics engine developer and vehicle dynamics engineer for VRC (Virtual RC Racing) and VRC Pro (the successor and current product).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSfoGDWMzgo Here are the official trailers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw8-Z4IPTjg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ZJGnrPpQI


I was involved in that from 2000 to early 2014. We wrote our own engines for that from scratch which took years and years (four years for the first title and six years for the second). As the physics engine developer, I had nothing to do with the graphics engine, but they were using DirectX. The guy that wrote the graphics engine was interested in doing OpenGL too, but practically speaking it can be really expensive to do both. If I took a year off of physics engine development and vehicle dynamics work to help him write an OpenGL version of the renderer, I wouldn't be making new vehicles or improving the physics for that time. The suspension system above was a major rewrite that took me nine months, so it's a lot of work and takes serious time to do this kind of thing that would have been traded away for Linux support or whatever. So there's a big cost there that none of us could see being justified. I don't know, we might have taken seven or eight years to develop VRC Pro instead of six had we done that, which would mean I wouldn't be doing the boat simulator now and this conversation wouldn't be happening.

We targeted the typical Windows user and didn't even bother with Apple or Linux or the others because the market share on those was too small to bother with. In our case people are managing to run the product on Apple machines anyway with emulators, so it's really a good thing we didn't bother trying to develop the sims twice just to get an extra 5% of the market or whatever it was at the time. We got it for free anyway eventually due to the works of others. The fact is that the vast majority of Windows users didn't know about the product anyway, so the way I saw it, until we could get the product in front of most of them (advertising/marketing) there wasn't much point in going cross platform.

If we had to write a substantial portion of the game twice to support those other platforms we probably wouldn't have done it. There's just not enough money to be made to warrant it. It's hard enough to break even on Windows. The big money is really in the consoles anyway.

As for the architectures you describe, you clearly know a lot more about that than I do. As a Unity engine user though I'm going to let the Unity people decide what they want to do with all that. They already support 21 or so different platforms including mobile devices, I literally just have to click a different button to export the game to whichever platform I have a license for. Some small bits of code might have to be rewritten here and there perhaps, but it's not a big deal anymore if you're using something like Unity. I haven't seen any signs that they or the Unreal Engine people are going to drop DirectX for any reason any time soon though. I've been listening to arguments like yours now for 15 or 20 years, many people just keep insisting DirectX will go away for this or that reason and it never does. I'm not an infallible predictor of the future though. I guess time will tell.

It must be said though that if I have to write a game essentially two or three times to get the same sales I can get now due to Windows market dominance, I won't be in business.

Having said all that, the only graphics engines I've written myself were indeed OpenGL just because it's so much easier to work with. I've never written a DirectX graphics engine myself. Cross platform isn't all just about the renderer choice though, writing for Windows is a bit different from writing for other platforms with the message loop and so forth being there. You could write an OpenGL version that only runs on Windows too, it's not all about the renderer.

Todd Wasson

Not sure if this may be of interest to you or not. You may know this and plenty more already, but just in case:

I just checked my web site stats and the breakdown of users by operating system is as follows:

Windows 72.2%
Macintosh 17.7%
Linux 9.3%
Others 1.3%

I seem to remember many years ago Windows being more like 90-95% (maybe 15 years ago?), not sure. So while the others are perhaps gaining on Windows, it's taking a very long time. Linux is still only about 10% of these numbers though, and I think the bots and so forth that run on Linux and the others are included in that. With bills to pay it doesn't make any business sense to go to great lengths to support Linux in my case anytime soon. Unity might already do it anyway through a build option, I haven't checked.

I remember working with a guy probably 20 years ago that was all about Linux too, he was convinced it'd take over the world and Microsoft would go away, but the fact remains that it simply hasn't. I just don't see it happening, personally, at least not at the rate it's been going since 2000. It's like one percentage point a year or something.

As for the Mac users, they can run emulators that will run Windows games anyway (we have threads in VRC Pro forums from many people doing it), so that 15-20% group is taken care of by developing it for Windows using either DirectX or OpenGL anyway.

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue. Maybe what you're saying will come to pass, I can't predict the future as well as you might be able to. From where I stand right now though it doesn't make sense to bend over backwards to grab that last 10%. Realistically, I'll be lucky to ever get my Windows boat sim in front of 0.01% of Windows users anyway. I would focus on getting that high enough before worrying too much about that last 10% of people running Linux or whatever else.