Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #64

Well, this is it. Floppy Fridays – at least for now – have come to an end. For some time I’ve been saying I’d stop at episode 64 – as the main focus of the series is the awesome Commodore 64 – and this episode has come around, finally. And, despite me following basically my usual random approach for selecting games for this episode, it was a really good way to end the series, with a wide range of very interesting games. We kicked off with the classic Turrican II - The Final Fight – a game we’d played... Read more →

A belated Happy New Year

I’ve now been back at work for a few days after an extended holiday break, so my head is back far enough above water for me to write a quick blog post. At Autodesk we were extremely lucky to have an extended holiday shutdown, this festive season, so employees around the world clocked off after work on December 17th. For me this meant a perfect opportunity to hit the slopes ahead of the Christmas rush. My kids were in school until the 23rd, but I managed have a few days hanging out on my own, up in the mountains,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #63

In this week’s episode – the first of 2022 – we take a look at five Commodore 64 games, although we only get to play four of them. We start with Bomb Jack, then (once again!) fail to load Test Drive, before playing Ace, Pitstop II and wrap things up with another Hewson Consultants classic, Eliminator. Here’s the cover art from this week’s selection: Now for a couple of reviews from Zzap! 64 magazine. Here’s one for Bomb Jack from issue 14: And here's a much more positive one for Pitstop II from issue 2: See you next week... Read more →

Floppy Friday #62

So here it is, the last episode of 2021. The first game we attempted to play – Super Huey – in many ways set the scene for the rest of the episode. Here’s a quote about the game from one of its reviews, as per its Wikipedia entry: "For those desiring an 8-bit helicopter flight simulator, Super Huey and its sequels fill the bill. For those desiring excitement as well, it would pay dividends to look elsewhere." Ouch. After not even being able to take off, we moved on to Crystal Fever (which I failed to find a level... Read more →

Floppy Friday #61

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, the breadbins were whirring, without even a mouse. - Unknown It’s the Christmas eve Floppy Friday! In this episode we discover a few interesting – and largely unheard or, I believe – games, as well as a couple we’ve played in prior episodes. I was really surprised/impressed with the Italian motorbike game we started off playing, if nothing else that for the progress bar while loading. Could this be the first example of a game having such a feature? (I’d be very happy to hear it’s not the case,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #60

Well, we made it to episode 60! Just four more to go after today’s episode. Today we ended up playing Eagle Empire – a clone of the class arcade game, Phoenix – and then we played an old favourite again: last time it was called Pogo, while this time it went by its more usual name of Nebulus. Then we played a somewhat disappointing Petch before failing to load Dam Busters and finishing up by actually playing the rather good Knight Games. Here’s the cover art for this week’s episode: Here’s the review for Knight Games from Zzap! 64... Read more →

A video on visibility and daylight analysis with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the third part of his video series introducing capabilities of the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package for Dynamo. This part focuses on how VASA can perform visibility and daylighting analyses. Here’s an animation showing some of topics covered: And here’s the video itself: We’re taking a break from this series now until the New Year, when Rhys will be sharing a walkthrough of the remaining VASA samples. Read more →

Daily coding challenges in December with Advent of Code

My old friend Simon Breslav pointed me to Advent of Code a week or more ago, but at first I was hesitant. Where would I find the time to tackle a daily coding challenge that wasn’t related to work? Would I even be up to the challenge, given the fact I’m not coding full-time and may not be up-to-date with the latest techniques? Here’s a speech by the creator of Advent of Code, Eric Wastl, where he talks about the origins of AoC from back in 2015, and how it’s gone from strength to strength since: Anyway, come Friday... Read more →

Floppy Friday #59

In this week’s episode we play five more fun (or less fun) Commodore 64 games, loaded from floppy diskettes. We start with a pro wrestling game called Rock ‘n’ Wrestle, followed by a couple of platform games: Miner 2049er and Mr. Do’s Castle. We then played Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge and wrapped up with an educational game called Quick Thinking! Robot Tables. Here’s some cover art from this episode: Here’s a review of Rock ‘n’ Wrestle from issue 12 of Zzap! 64 magazine: And one last thing… here’s the music video for a song called Computer Games by the... Read more →

VASA 0.1.2 is now available

The first version of VASA we posted to the Dynamo package manager was numbered 0.1.0. Yesterday we posted a new version with some interesting new features, not least of which is the lack of an error when you install it (this one was very much my fault: I’d neglected to mark a couple of DLLs as not being node libraries when I posted it). Here’s a breakdown of the new features in 0.1.2, courtesy of the package’s author, Rhys Goldstein: Added VoxelModel.ToSolid, which converts a voxel model into a Dynamo solid that can be processed using standard Dynamo operations... Read more →

Using VASA via WebAssembly for pathfinding inside FormIt

As a quick recap, here are the posts we’ve seen in recent weeks on this topic: Autodesk FormIt and its JavaScript API Introductory look at FormIt and the Maze Generator plugin. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 1 How VASA can be used within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes (etc.) in 3D. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2 Applying the same principle with urban scenes imported by the 3D Context Creator plugin. In today’s post we look at the fact that VASA can also be used directly from a FormIt JavaScript plugin –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #58

I almost thought today’s episode wasn’t going to happen. I started checking the directory listings for a few floppies, and suddenly things started to fail. I couldn’t read any at all, and ended up trying a series of combinations of different computers, floppy drives and cables, all with similar (bad) results. I went back to cleaning the drive heads (once again – this was the first thing I tried) and eventually things started to work in time for me to record the episode. Totally surreal! I can only blame those nasty gremlins who clearly enjoy haunting 1980s equipment. Anyway,... Read more →

Come work at Autodesk on the Tandem team!

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R13688 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 I’m really happy to see that the Tandem team is hiring. And they’re hiring into a really varied set of roles, so hopefully there’s something in this list for everyone. :-) Customer Adoption Specialist Principal Software Developer Senior Software Developer UX Designer Senior UX Designer Technical Program Manager I’m pretty sure that all these positions are “remote-ready”, although I believe from a timezone perspective the Eastern US is strongly preferred for at least the engineering-centric roles. I may have that wrong, of course, and I’ll be sure to come back and... Read more →

Frustrated by travel restrictions? Join the last virtual Forge Accelerator of 2021!

The subject is basically a perfect description of my own situation, today, but I thought there might be others out there in the same boat (as it were). I have a feeling that more people will end up being stuck at home over the next few weeks, whether they like it or not. From my side I was very much looking forward to a trip to the UK, next week, where I’d have had the chance to catch up with my UK colleagues for the first time in-person in probably 2 years. And to join for the team Christmas... Read more →

Floppy Friday #57

In this week’s episode we mostly played Summer Games II. It’s not exactly how I expected things to turn out, but there you go. It’s also a game I’d already played back in Floppy Friday #32 – I knew it looked familiar! (sigh) – but I chose a different set of disciplines to be awful at. Apart from the javelin, as I seem to love failing at that one. I’m pretty sure I fluffed selecting nationalities in exactly the same way, too, but hey. We did get a little time to play a couple of other games – Commando... Read more →

An interview and an anniversary

Recently Mayur Mistry from Engineering ArchiTECHure asked me to join him for a YouTube livestream. Mayur often holds his interviews over the weekend, but he very kindly accommodated my schedule and held the session during the week. So while it was “live”, it wasn’t at the usual time for Mayur’s subscribers and the discussion remained very much between the two of us. I’ve seen some really good sessions on his channel – several of his guests have prepared extensive material to show – so my apologies if you’re expecting something more formal: we just chatted for an hour. Many... Read more →

Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2

In the last post we looked at using VASA from within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes generated by a cool plugin created by Brett from the FormIt team. The Dynamo graph we saw used VASA in “3D mode” – where the voxel height is higher than 1 – but that came with the added need to create a floor for the maze (something that isn’t too hard, as we know the exact dimensions and location of the maze). In today’s post we’re looking at how VASA might be used to perform pathfinding operations at the urban scale, taking... Read more →

Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 1

In this recent post we looked at FormIt’s JavaScript API and learned how Brett Garrison was able to use it to develop a Maze Generator plugin. In this post we look at one way to find solutions for the mazes generated by this plugin using VASA from Dynamo. When I first started looking into VASA with FormIt, Rhys Goldstein sent across a Dynamo graph he’d used to grab contextual building geometry from FormIt – to create a voxel model of the space – and then send the pathfinding results back afterwards. I’ve adapted this graph to work with the... Read more →

Floppy Friday #56

In this week’s episode we play 4 games on a Commodore 64, loaded from 5 1/4” floppy disk. We started with a game I had high hopes for – coming from Gremlin Graphics, and being based on a series of “fighting fantasy” gamebooks (although not the Steve Jackson & Ian Livingston ones, it seems) – called Blood Valley. We then played Pac-Land, an interesting game called ATF (Advanced Tactical Fighter) and then Thrust II. Here’s the cover art for this week’s selection: The folks at Zzap! 64 magazine loathed Blood Valley ... … and tolerated Thrust II: As mentioned... Read more →

Want to see Dasher inside Tandem? Tell us what you need.

The Autodesk Tandem team has just launched their Customer Research Program. This is the perfect way to engage with the Tandem team and let them know what features you might need from your future digital twin infrastructure. In particular, if you’re interested in seeing features from Project Dasher show up inside Tandem – via what I referred to in a recent post as “Dasher inside Tandem” – then this is your chance to be heard. Related to this topic, I came across a funny meme recently on Twitter. I couldn’t find it again, so here’s my attempt at reproducing... Read more →