Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #34

In this week’s episode we take a look at three classic Commodore 64 games. The first game, The Last Ninja 2, is a sequel to a game we played last week, of course. The second game, Ghostbusters, is one I used to play on my ZX Spectrum as a child, although the C64 version looks quite different. The last game, Fighter Pilot, was basically incomprehensible, but there you go. Here’s the cover art for these three games (although I’m not completely sure about the last one). One of these days I’m going to have a “ZX Spectrum classics” episode,... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at how a heatmap can be used to shade an object using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – or Project Hyperion. In our case we shaded the surface of the MX3D bridge. In this post we look at a slightly different use-case for this mechanism, where we want to shade a piece of geometry inside the model based on the value of a particular sensor. To be clear: this is about shading the entire object a uniform colour that varies based on the value of the sensor that’s providing... Read more →

Enjoying an early summer quiet period? Attend next week’s Forge Accelerator!

Summer has finally started kicking in, here in Switzerland, which is wonderful. I saw this field of poppies, yesterday, which was simply stunning: the majority of the field was purple with a small border of red ones near the edges (although this doesn’t really come across in the photo). I hadn’t seen these poppies before, so did 30 seconds of Internet research to find out they were Papaver somniferum, commonly called the opium poppy. (It seems more likely that the field is being used for edible poppyseeds than being a hotbed of Swiss opium production, though.) Anyway, as the... Read more →

Floppy Friday #33

This week’s episode looks at three games I’d checked out briefly yesterday, as I’d been getting a little fed-up with editing out games that didn’t load. As it was I had to load the first game – The Last Ninja – three times before it worked properly (I did edit that bit out). After that we played Die Hard and Gee Bee Air Rally. All this week’s games were fun to play: The Last Ninja is considered a real classic, it seems, and while Die Hard starts slow, it apparently gets more interesting later on. Here are the Zzap!64... Read more →

Setting the vertical position of planar heatmaps

In a recent post we talked about the integration of Hyperion’s planar heatmap capability into Dasher. Towards the end of that post, I mentioned that the Hyperion team was looking into exposing some way to place planar heatmaps not only at the minimum and maximum vertical locations in the bounding box, but at levels in-between. The team has delivered this more quickly than I expected, and you’ll be able to try it for yourselves in v7.45 of the Forge viewer. While I was adding the sliders needed for the capabilities shown in the last post, I went ahead and... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 1

Over the next few posts – in this series, anyway – we’re going to take a look at the shading of objects (actually meshes) using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion). This is something we’ve done in Dasher for some time, and I was excited that using Hyperion would once again allow us not only to rip out some of our old code but also to go in new directions and explore interesting new capabilities. Let’s first explain how this type of shading differs from what we’ve seen in previous posts, namely volumetric room and planar shading:... Read more →

Floppy Friday #32

That’s it – we’re halfway there! I was hoping to make a bigger splash with my 2^5th episode, but between my first vaccine jab and my first foray into team sports in 8 months (yes, perhaps not the wisest combo, but there you go), I had neither the time nor the energy to make something fancy. I was actually hoping that some good friends would come through with a Commodore SX-64 they have in their attic, but it turned out to be harder to uncover than expected. Hopefully still one for a future episode. We covered a few games... Read more →

DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

The material for this year’s online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here’s the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from... Read more →

Autodesk University 2021 will be in early October

The big news of the last week or so – although I’m well behind the curve, given prior announcements by the AU and Forge teams – is that the dates for Autodesk University 2021 have been fixed, and announced along with the event’s pricing. As anticipated from the somewhat early CFP process, this year’s AU will be held in early October. It wasn’t so long ago that AU was in December, so this is a significant shift for many – and will mean that speakers are likely to have to spend some time this summer getting their material together,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #31

This week’s episode is longer than I expected, but I found I kept going on to the next game as the one before left me wanting more. I would have loved to have played the first game – Who Dares Wins II – for longer, but it crashed almost straightaway. One to come back to, at some point. (I mentioned its similarity to Commando: according to Wikipedia, the first Who Dares Wins was “given an injunction” for basically being a copy of Commando. Funny!) Here’s its review from Issue 8 of Zzap!64 magazine: The next game, Fighting Warrior, was... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion's planar heatmaps into Dasher

Having spent time recently looking at integrating sprites and volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher, today we move on to a capability that we didn’t have previously but has been enabled by Project Hyperion (i.e. the new Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer): planar heatmaps. Planar heatmaps do just what you’d expect: they display a heatmap for 3D geometry in a plane. This means you can display a heatmap on the floor or ceiling of rooms, or place them on tables or work surfaces. They might – for instance – be used to indicate usage of an area, such... Read more →

Floppy Friday #30

In this week’s episode we dust off the Atari 2600 and play a few games on cartridge. We kick things off with Stargate, which is a sequel to Defender, apparently, and then play Missile Command followed by Moon Patrol – games we saw (or talked about) on the C64 in episodes #6 and #26 respectively. After jumping over a few lunar craters, we head back down to Earth to jump hurdles in Summer Games and then juggle hacky sacks and ride downhill mountain bikes in California Games. During the episode I mentioned “that line drawing algorithm” which was meant... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 2

I was thinking back on last week’s post regarding the work needed to integrate Hyperion’s volumetric heatmaps into Dasher, and realised that – despite the relative length of the post – I’d really glossed over the process for integrating heatmaps and using them to display sensor data. So I’ve retroactively gone back and marked that post as “Part 1”, with this post being “Part 2”. That’s not to say the process is especially complicated, but I felt it was a bit of a cop out to say “just follow the documentation”, as there was a little more to it... Read more →

Floppy Friday #29

It’s still a holiday, here in Switzerland, so I’ll keep this post short and sweet. We played four games on the C64 in today’s Floppy Friday: Defender (which we played in Floppy Friday #25 on the Atari 2600), One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, Sammy Lightfoot and David’s Midnight Magic: I couldn’t find a review of any of these games in good old Zzap! 64, so I’ve cobbled together an image from the cover art for three of them: See you next week! Read more →

Job postings in the Forge viewer team

It’s a holiday in most of Central Europe (including Switzerland), but I thought I’d quickly highlight a couple of interesting opportunities at Autodesk. I posted about one of these, a few weeks ago, but there’s another position that has come up, since then. The Forge viewer team is looking not just for a Senior Product Owner (as mentioned before) but also a Principle Software Engineer. Both roles are SF-based, but I suspect this is probably more a question of timezone than anything, given the way the world is changing. The successful applicants are likely to have involvement in the... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion's volumetric room heatmaps into Dasher – Part 1

Today’s post is a follow-on from the first part where we looked at integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher. (The posts are independent, though, so you don’t have to read the first one if you’re only interested in integrating heatmaps.) I was supposed to publish this at the beginning of the week, but I ended up getting bogged down by a couple of urgent projects – both of which I’m happy to say have led to me making some interesting enhancements to Dasher, which is, at least, something. Anyway, the topic I wanted to share is the approach for integrating... Read more →

Floppy Friday #28

In this week’s episode we take a look at CAD – yes, 3D CAD! – on a Commodore home computer. I’ve talked in the past about getting Home Designer running on a C128, but in this episode we look at a German-made application called Giga-CAD on the C64. It took a little while for it to get going, but I was frankly very impressed with what it could do. Here’s the episode where we look at Giga-CAD (not yet the Plus version) followed by a quick bit of gaming. As usual, I really didn’t research the software much (or... Read more →

It’s officially available: Data Visualization Extension for the Forge Viewer

The big news from this week (for me, anyway, aside from a very enjoyable Star Wars Day, yesterday) is that Project Hyperion has been released officially to the public as the Forge Viewer’s Data Visualization Extension. All you need to do is to use it is to start making use of the Forge Viewer from v7.42 (it is available in earlier versions, but this is the most complete version) and then take a look at the extensive online documentation. Congratulations to the Hyperion team for this major milestone! The work that has been done by that team to engineer... Read more →

May The Fourth Be With You

Yes, it’s Star Wars Day, once again. My kids have all gone off to school in their favourite Star Wars T-shirts, while I’ve stayed at home in my slippers. Over the weekend I did a little preparation, getting around to building my latest birthday gift. Are you having some fun today, yourself? Happy May the 4th! Read more →

Floppy Friday #27

In this week’s Floppy Friday we stumble across a diskette from the German Commodore 64 magazine, Game On, from June 1992. It contains three games – The Pearl of Dawn, Twin Down and No Deeper Meaning – and a couple of graphics/music demos – Mstocephaloid/XS and Destination ‘91. I didn’t know they were demos when I loaded them, of course, but we got there eventually. Being on a floppy that basically came free with a magazine, none of these are especially “top shelf” (I use that in the North American sense of the term, although in fairness it’s also... Read more →