Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #44

Another mix of games in this week’s episode! It’s hard to know what the first game, Road Runner, was meant to be, as it really must have been corrupted – there’s no other reason for the graphics to be so messed up. The second, The Hobbit, was an illustrated text adventure I remember playing for hours on my ZX Spectrum as a boy. The third was B.C.’s Quest for Tires, which seems like it was probably a classic when it came out in 1983. We finished up with an obscure but playable title named Fortress Underground, which I actually... Read more →

A new face in the Autodesk Tandem team

My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher’s skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on... Read more →

Floppy Friday #43

This week’s episode is an interesting one, in that it includes a couple of Italian games that I’ve found no reference to on the interwebs. And both were really fun to play! The first was Miami Race (that’s right – not Vice, but Race), which was a very playable (i.e. fun and easy) racing game, while the second was called Pogo, which was a puzzle platformer with some really interesting 3D rotational effects. We then went on to play Mandroid and the first text adventure we’ve tried in this series, S*M*A*S*H*E*D. We then tried – but ultimately failed –... Read more →

Going viral during a pandemic

I’ve been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean, Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently being circulated all around the globe in a viral meme? Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of... Read more →

Previewing and viewing PDFs inside Dasher

A couple of days ago we were looking for the datasheets for the various sensors installed in the MX3D bridge: as you’ve probably already read, there are nearly a hundred sensors in and on the bridge, although of only about eight different model types. My colleague Josh Cameron said, in passing, “it would be really handy to have these datasheets integrated into Dasher!”. As usual, this sent me down a rather fun rabbit-hole for a day or so, to see how we might reasonably integrate these PDFs into Dasher. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that these days the Forge... Read more →

Floppy Friday #42

In this week’s episode we take a look at four games, with a brief interlude of Nothin’ Special. The first game was a Pac-Man clone that’s apparently called Munch Man 64. We then went on to play two “patrol” games (which basically have nothing in common beyond the name): Falcon Patrol II and Park Patrol. We wrap up by playing Ace of Aces, albeit - once again - very poorly. Here’s the cover art I could find for three of this week’s games: Only one had a review in Zzap!64 magazine: Ace of Aces was rated very highly in... Read more →

AU 2021 update & MX3D on the AU blog

The count-down to Autodesk University 2021 continues, with registration for the event now open. I’ve gone ahead and registered, as I expect many of you will at some point during the remaining 54 days. It’s free, after all, and I’m sure will have lots of great content, as usual. Be sure to put the dates in your calendar – October 5-7 for the Americas, October 6-8 for EMEA & APAC, October 13-14 for East Asia. The timing of this year’s event – being several weeks earlier – means that it falls during our children’s half-term break. This year –... Read more →

Dynamo 2.12, MaRS v3 and the future of Space Analysis

The latest update to Dynamo Core (which for now you can use via Dynamo Sandbox) has some really interesting enhancements, both in terms of usability and performance. Check out Sol Amour’s two blog posts that introduce Dynamo Core 2.12. As it had been a while since I’d tried the MaRS graph in a new drop of Dynamo, I went ahead and loaded it. I immediately noticed a couple of things: it was referencing an old, now-deprecated version of the Solar Analysis package, so I updated to the latest & greatest version on my system and then reloaded the graph... Read more →

Floppy Friday #41

Last week I mentioned that this week we’d be continuing on the sporting theme, in honour of the Tokyo Olympics. In addition to the Indoor Sports compilation I’d found, I came across World Games, which is the first set of games we tried in this week’s episode. Here’s the cover art for this week’s games: It seems World Games was well received – here’s a glowing review from issue 19 of Zzap!64 magazine: I’ll probably switch away from sports for next week, as people will probably be happy for a break by then. Read more →

Using the Forge viewer? It’s time to switch to SVF2!

The big news on the Forge side of things over the last few weeks is probably the official release of SVF2. This is a more efficient streaming format the Forge viewer (from v7.25 onwards) can consume. We’ve been using SVF2 (which was previously known as OTG) for the last couple of years inside Project Dasher, and it’s been brilliant. If you’re interested in the technical details on SVF2, be sure to check the blog post that announced the SVF2 Beta from late last year. Just for instance, we’ve seen significant performance improvements from using SVF2 for our public demo... Read more →