Through the Interface

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 →

Integrating Hyperion sprites into Dasher

As mentioned on Monday, I’ve been having lots of fun getting Hyperion to work inside Dasher, this week. All good preparation for the AU class I hope will be accepted for this year’s conference. Right now I have sprites working, which is an important first step (and doesn’t actually involve any of the more gnarly, data-related issues I expect to have when w tackle surface shading/heatmaps). In this post we’re going to step through the main steps taken to make this happen, but also to describe some of the important changes that were needed to make it all work... Read more →

My AU 2021 class proposal on integrating Hyperion with Dasher

On Friday I went ahead and submitted my one and only class proposal for the all-digital Autodesk University 2021. Let’s hope it gets selected. In case you’re interested, here’s the content of the proposal: Title: Dasher and Hyperion: using Data Visualization in a Forge viewer application Class ID: SD500020 Product(s): Forge Topics: Building Information Modeling (BIM), Building Operations, Internet of Things (IoT), Software Development Session Description Autodesk Research started Project Dasher in 2009 to explore the possibilities around integrating IoT data with BIM. In 2016 it was ported to work on the Forge platform, to understand the feasibility and... Read more →

Floppy Friday #26

I wasn’t sure whether I would stick with the Atari 2600 for this week’s Floppy Friday, but as I received a new batch of floppies by post at lunchtime, I decided to dig in and see what was there. After initially loading Create with Garfield! (and no, I won’t be loading that one again), I fell upon a single diskette with a pretty interesting little collection of games, and ended up just loading a handful of them. Here’s the episode: We started by playing Back to Nature (also known as “Frog”), and then a strange little game called Spider.... Read more →

The last week to submit your AU 2021 class proposal

It’s come around quickly, I know. At the end of next week the CFP closes for Autodesk University 2021 – it’s really time to submit! This year’s AU is being held a touch earlier than usual: I don’t believe the specific dates have been shared, as yet, but given the timing of this year’s CFP I’d expect it to be a month or so earlier than last year. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my own class proposal over the coming days, and will share it early next week. This quick post is really just a quick reminder... Read more →

Watch the recordings from SimAUD 2021

As mentioned last week, this year’s Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD) was held on Friday and Saturday of last week (with some pre-conference workshops on the Thursday). Autodesk has supported SimAUD since its inception – in fact a number of the people who started the conference were working for Autodesk Research at the time – and we continue to be a proud sponsor of the event, I’m pleased to say. It’s great that our sponsorship helped this year’s SimAUD be free to attend, as it encouraged record numbers of registrants (500+!) and attendees. If you... Read more →

Floppy Friday #25

This week’s Floppy Friday is once again floppiless, as we take a new old Atari CX 2600 A – with its gorgeous wood panelling – for a spin: We focus on space-themed video games – which were apparently a favourite for early video game designers, as the emptiness of space lent itself to more limited hardware platforms – looking at Space Invaders, Asteroids, Phoenix and Defender. (In case people are interested, we looked at Space Invaders and Asteroids on the C6 in Floppy Friday #14 and we saw some games on the Atari 2600 Jr in Floppy Friday #20.)... Read more →

Creating additional documentation for Space Analysis in Dynamo 2.11

I mentioned last week that Dynamo 2.11 allows package owners to add additional documentation for their nodes via the enhanced Documentation Browser. I decided to give it a try, and then decided to test the possibilities around automating the process. Here’s the idea: the Space Analysis package comes with 15 different samples showing how to use its various nodes. These are all hidden away in the %appdata%\Dynamo\Dynamo [Core|Revit]\2.x\packages\SpaceAnalysis\extra folder, so lots of people don’t know they exist. What if the Documentation Browser told you about the samples that use a particular node when you pull up its help? Here’s... Read more →

Attend SimAUD 2021 for free

This year’s Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD) is starting on Thursday April 15th and runs through to Saturday April 17th. Thanks to sponsorship, people can attend this year’s SimAUD completely free, although people are being encouraged to donate their normal registration fee to either offset carbon emissions or to encourage the next generation of simulation experts via Girls Who Code. I really like SimAUD – I attended a physical event at TUDelft in 2018 and was involved in the Generative Design track in 2020 (and I have to say that given its size and nature... Read more →

Floppy Friday #24

In this week’s episode we load (or try to, anyway) a number of games from one floppy. We start with a game called Up ’n’ Down (mis-labelled as Bump ‘n’ Jump) and then try to play Jump Jet before moving onto BMX Simulator. Finally I try to load The Goonies, but fail miserably. I’ll have to see if I have it elsewhere, or can copy it to a floppy from a .d64 image. Here’s the video: Here are some reviews from Zzap!64 magazine. For Up ’n’ Down: For Jump Jet: For BMX Simulator: That’s it for this week. As... Read more →

Come work on Hyperion to help drive Data Visualization with Forge

The Forge viewer team is seeking to hire a San Francisco-based Senior Product Owner for Project Hyperion, the technology being made available as the Data Visualization Extension. (If you’re not familiar with the term Product Owner then in fairness you’re probably not a good fit for this position – the successful candidate will have PO experience – but here’s a link that may be of interest to you if you want to understand more about what’s involved.) This team is part of our Engineering organisation, but there are certainly connections to the work we’re doing over in Research: they... Read more →

Dynamo Core 2.11 (and Dynamo 2.10 and Generative Design in Revit 2022)

It’s that time of year, where our engineering teams release the primary annual updates to our products. AutoCAD 2022 was released a couple of weeks ago, and Revit 2022 dropped yesterday. I unfortunately spend very little time in our products, these days, so I’ll leave others to extoll their various benefits. Aside from working with the Forge platform, the product (or perhaps feature-set) I spend the most time with is Dynamo. I’m always happy to see Sol’s public release announcements on the DynamoBIM blog, both for his unique writing style and the velocity of improvements the team is making... Read more →

Floppy Friday #23

Yes, every Floppy Friday’s a good Friday, but today’s really a Good Friday. I hope those of you who wish to – and are able to – are enjoying a nice, long weekend. In this week’s episode, we look at three games from 1983-4 that were released on a 1985 compilation called 10 Mega Hits (all I saw on the floppy was “Mega Disk 2”, which makes sense, as the ten games would probably have been delivered on two cassettes or floppies). The games are Super Pipeline, Trollie Wallie and Automania (once again this last one was only on... Read more →

Project Dasher for the Commodore 64

I’ve been having soooo much fun with my Floppy Fridays that I couldn’t resist trying my hand at developing some code for the Commodore 64. It meant dusting off my BASIC skills – and even dipping into some Assembler for some of the more advanced effects – but I think the results are worth it. After some months of behind-the-scenes effort, I can proudly unveil my (and Autodesk Research’s) first project for the C64. Although I found out last week that John Walker – Autodesk’s founder and former CEO – also developed a number of programs for the C64... Read more →