Herculian efforts
Wiimotes
I've recently purchased a Wii and I've really enjoyed the end-user experience. It's awesome. Quite possibly one of the most innovative ideas to come out of Nintendo in years. To see this platform bring smiles to my parents, grandfather, and uncle in one fell swoop was definitely worth the proverbial "cash-money".
I've become interested in integrating this experience on my PC and I've managed to get my PC to link to the Wiimote by-way of a 30 dollar USB bluetooth antenna. I'm in the process of building an IR emitter so the Wiimotes lateral and vertical data can be captured and processed by my PC.
Unfortunately, most of the Wiimote libraries out there are lame, feature incomplete, and just not really all that easy to work with. I'm working to change that. I've found a library called "WiiYourself!" (the most feature complete one out there) and I'm in the process of re-working this source code so it can be a little more malleable. Oh and so that it can support Python...and Panda3d.
Currently, and I'll try to be polite here, it's a hideous beast of spaghetti code that makes me shudder to think that a human mind was capable of such convoluted expressions of "cpp syntax". To say it's a work in progress is to say...much.
Blender
The "Angry One" (a former roommate of mine at my much bemoaned Clemson) was working on a plugin project for this application some 3 years ago. Well, we've been pushing this beast up development hell hill for a couple years now. We've applied different improvements to the application and when it dawned on us that we need to port the beast from it's Python parentage to a more speedy and seedy C++ implementation. We were discouraged by this effort and managed to complete the project about a month ago. Unfortunately, the output data is "wiggidy-wack" to say the least.
We're tweaking this beast hopefully we can have some solid results prior to Christmas but, there I go again making promises and falling back on wishful thinking.
Panda3d
I've inspired the "Angry One" to assist me in an effort to use "Panda3d" to implement a very simple video game. Why?
For the sake of back story...I wanted to avoid video games like the plague prior to and during college. And guess what I discovered? It's in my blood. It's genetic. I've seen my dad. He's a gamer. Ergo, I'm a gamer. Ipso facto. I've slowly managed to pick up the habit again. Spending the past couple of years in the desert has also managed to only strengthen my resolve to game. I can't help it.
So we've started this effort. It may end up commercial and it may not. We're not sure. We need something to look at and mess with prior to making that decision but, we're both excited at the prospect and I'm adamantly and inconsistently burning up hours that would otherwise be wasted preparing for the GRE or reading...books... working on this endeavor. I almost have the physics simulator working with the visualization component. Almost.
I've recently purchased a Wii and I've really enjoyed the end-user experience. It's awesome. Quite possibly one of the most innovative ideas to come out of Nintendo in years. To see this platform bring smiles to my parents, grandfather, and uncle in one fell swoop was definitely worth the proverbial "cash-money".
I've become interested in integrating this experience on my PC and I've managed to get my PC to link to the Wiimote by-way of a 30 dollar USB bluetooth antenna. I'm in the process of building an IR emitter so the Wiimotes lateral and vertical data can be captured and processed by my PC.
Unfortunately, most of the Wiimote libraries out there are lame, feature incomplete, and just not really all that easy to work with. I'm working to change that. I've found a library called "WiiYourself!" (the most feature complete one out there) and I'm in the process of re-working this source code so it can be a little more malleable. Oh and so that it can support Python...and Panda3d.
Currently, and I'll try to be polite here, it's a hideous beast of spaghetti code that makes me shudder to think that a human mind was capable of such convoluted expressions of "cpp syntax". To say it's a work in progress is to say...much.
Blender
The "Angry One" (a former roommate of mine at my much bemoaned Clemson) was working on a plugin project for this application some 3 years ago. Well, we've been pushing this beast up development hell hill for a couple years now. We've applied different improvements to the application and when it dawned on us that we need to port the beast from it's Python parentage to a more speedy and seedy C++ implementation. We were discouraged by this effort and managed to complete the project about a month ago. Unfortunately, the output data is "wiggidy-wack" to say the least.
We're tweaking this beast hopefully we can have some solid results prior to Christmas but, there I go again making promises and falling back on wishful thinking.
Panda3d
I've inspired the "Angry One" to assist me in an effort to use "Panda3d" to implement a very simple video game. Why?
For the sake of back story...I wanted to avoid video games like the plague prior to and during college. And guess what I discovered? It's in my blood. It's genetic. I've seen my dad. He's a gamer. Ergo, I'm a gamer. Ipso facto. I've slowly managed to pick up the habit again. Spending the past couple of years in the desert has also managed to only strengthen my resolve to game. I can't help it.
So we've started this effort. It may end up commercial and it may not. We're not sure. We need something to look at and mess with prior to making that decision but, we're both excited at the prospect and I'm adamantly and inconsistently burning up hours that would otherwise be wasted preparing for the GRE or reading...books... working on this endeavor. I almost have the physics simulator working with the visualization component. Almost.
posted by ct @ 5:48 AM
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