Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #9

It’s Christmas Day and another Floppy Friday! Today’s episode looks at two quite similar horizontally scrolling shooters, R-Type and Katakis/Denaris. There’s a brief mention of Arkanoid, at the end, but that’s really something we’ll see another day. Read more →

Dynamo Core 2.10

Santa (meaning Sol Amour) has left one last Dynamo release under the tree for us all to enjoy over the holidays: Dynamo Core 2.10. According to Sol’s post there have been a few updates to Node Autocomplete – which I mentioned a few weeks ago – but that we should expect many more to come. And there are other updates that are likely to be of interest in this release, too – check out Sol’s blog post but also the release notes. There are a few new nodes in this release, for instance: AnyTrue, AnyFalse and a Math.Random node... Read more →

Another robotically constructed bridge

This week Autodesk offices around the world are closed for an extended holiday break. I’m grateful for this additional time off at the end of a crazy year, as I’m sure all my Autodesk colleagues are. My children are still in school until Wednesday lunchtime, so I’ve taken the chance to hit the slopes for a few days before heading back down for a quiet family Christmas. (We’ll be back up in the mountains afterwards, assuming we’re still able to ski then.) As I’m largely at a loose end in the evening after coming back from the slopes, I... Read more →

Floppy Friday #8

It’s the last day of school! Well, of work. My kids still have school until Wednesday, but Autodesk has very generously insisted that its employees take an extended break over the holidays starting this evening. I’m planning to make the most of these two weeks – such as is possible with the pandemic-related restrictions – so I do hope to be able to queue up a couple more Floppy Fridays for the holidays, all being well. In today’s episode we look at two games – 1942 and Back to the Future – and mention a 3rd (Slap Fight, in... Read more →

Hyperion at last week’s Forge Accelerator

Last week was a big week for the team developing the Data Visualization Extension (codenamed Hyperion) for the Forge viewer. And for the Dasher team, of course, who were very excited to see what our development partners can do with the new Dasher-like capabilities being built into Forge. As it’s still early days for the extension, the decision was made to limit the number of organisations (I won’t say companies, as a university was included) who would work with Hyperion to just 5. With hindsight this was a very wise decision, as there were a number of teething issues... Read more →

The MX3D bridge on Quarantime

My friend and incredibly inspiring former colleague, Mickey McManus, has been co-hosting a regular (I want to say weekly) live-streamed event under the name of Quarantime. They’ve just posted the 51st episode (which means they must be doing this more than once per week) which featured another friend and current colleague, Alec Shuldiner. Alec has been the real workhorse driving forward the MX3D Smart Bridge project and Autodesk’s involvement in it. He joined Quarantime to talk about the project in the context of our cities’ future digital infrastructure. Here’s a snapshot with Project Dasher as a backdrop: It’s really... Read more →

Floppy Friday #7

This week’s Floppy Friday is slightly shorter and probably no sweeter, showcasing two fun Commodore 64 games that came in as viewer requests. Stefano Metrangolo asked that I try to find International Soccer (which also goes by the names of International Football or Cup Final, in some places) and Clint Brown requested TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or in this case Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles). As you’ll see in the video, to load the game I needed a “mission code” sheet, that luckily still exists online. I hope you enjoy the nostalgia hit, Stefano and Clint! Please do keep... Read more →

’Tis the season to build Dasher

During the last week the kids have been opening their Advent calendars, we had a visit from St. Nicholas (I’ve talked before about this central European tradition), and the Candy Cane accelerator has kicked off. All-in-all things are starting to feel very festive! (And yes, Dasher is one of Santa’s reindeer, so there’s that, too.) The accelerator has upwards of 30 companies and academic partners in attendance, with 5 or so of these focused on “building their own Dasher” using the upcoming Data Visualization Extension for the Forge viewer (Project Hyperion). Yesterday I presented a session on Project Dasher... Read more →

Floppy Friday #6

In this week’s episode we take a look at Missile Command and Impossible Mission, and also talk about Out Run – another of my arcade faves from back in the day. A shout-out to both Matt Armitage and Marco Fiocco, who were the inspiration for the games played. I’m very happy with how my system is shaping up: as mentioned in the video I now have a few hundred more floppies, some new old joysticks and a fixed video cable. For next week’s episode – depending on when the replacement chips arrive and whether they actually help – I... Read more →

Have you tried Node Auto Complete in Dynamo 2.9?

If so (or if not but you’re up for doing so) then the Dynamo team would like to hear from you! For some background, here’s the post on Dynamo Core 2.9 that introduces the feature. To enable the feature via Settings –> Experimental –> Enable Node Auto Complete. Then you can simple place a node (from the Library or by right-clicking on the canvas) and start to use auto-complete to find nodes to connect by Alt-clicking the input ports. Here’s me creating a small graph to create a polygon, for instance. From my cursory inspection it seems a really... Read more →