GRG's Miscellany

Yesterday I had extreme difficulty in doing air-to-air refueling in DCS World. The obvious reason for that would be that it is an extremely difficult thing to do and I am just not good enough yet. Not being happy admitting my own lack of ability, I decided to blame my homemade joystick. To be fair, my joystick was built by a numpty (me), so there could easily have been something screwy with it. When researching more expensive potentiometers, I discovered that 'linear' potentiometers do not necessarily give a linear response to changes in angle.  It depends on potentiometer model, temperature, and all sorts of other things. Seeing as the potentiometers I used were the cheapest I could possibly find, their quality is questionable at best.  So I figured I'd have to measure the response curve, then hard-code a calibration fudge. I was genuinely surprised with the results: There is a beautiful linear section for part of the response, but the bit from 55-75 degrees is just shock

      This evening I submitted F-Z , my entry for Lowrezjam2020 . I was going to make a helicopter game, but in 64x64 pixels I just couldn't get anything to actually look like a helicopter!  So I completely changed my mind and made an F-Zero style racer instead. In the limited time allowed for the jam, I only managed to make a single track.  However, the game was reasonably polished: it had a title-screen, menu, AI opponents, music, sound effects and a 'finished' race outro - with a particle effect for a podium place! It was the first time I'd written a racing AI.  I basically baked the AI instructions into the track tilemap, giving each AI-sector a heading value.  The runtime code loaded the sector polygon and calculated a middle-line for the sector using the polygon vertices and the heading.  The runtime AI first checked if it was way off the heading for the sector and corrected for that.  If the heading was okay, it checked if it was too far off the sector's mi

Last month's projects: Physical make: Model Starfury DONE! :) Coding make: Write a DOS Mode-X tribute to Silk Worm .  It's getting there... I'm taking a break from it this month though. Non-coding make: Fiction sci-fi fragment about a hand-to-mouth existence on a frontier world. I didn't get round to this at all.  I might just drop to three projects each month. Reading: Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin .  I finished it!  It was a really interesting read - I'd recommend it. August's projects: Physical make: CnC router.  I'd started this ages ago, and I have a platform which slides from side to side when you push it.  This month, I want to get the Raspberry Pi and motor controller to be able to control the movement of the platform.  Maybe I'll get further and build the mounting for my Dremel, but baby steps... Coding make: I'm going to write an entry for Lowrezjam 2020 .  My super-detailed plan which is in no way me making it up as I go along: to w