Blogs

Fun with Sound

Jun
17

Included with the Open GL package for Delphi [http://www.glscene.org GLScene] are various extras such as the ODE package as well as [http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html the BASS sound library]. Recently I took a closer look at the library to see what it can do. I have to say that it is pretty amazing.

The library is a relative small single (100K) DLL with header or unit files for various languages including VB, C, and Delphi. There also extension libraries that allow for specific encoding and special effects. It support playing streaming radio (Shoutcast) in the background as well as many audio files both wave based and music files such as MIDI and MOD music files. Check out the site link above for more details.

There are a number of sample programs, and the one showing how to play a Shoutcast feed was most interesting. My goal was to create an HTTP plugin that would be able to play that stations on the main simulation server box, (so that the music would come out of the main speakers), but allow control from one of the remote machines. Remarkably it worked on the first try, a rare occurance in web server modules, usually due to executing in a separate thread.

Posted By Charlie read more

More simulation frameworks

Apr
29

This mostly just to create some links to interesting sites worthy of more investigation:

[http://jsbsim.org JSB Open Source Flight Dynamics Modeler]

JSBSim is an open source flight dynamics model (FDM) that compiles and runs under many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, Cygwin (Unix on Windows), etc. The FDM is essentially the physics/math model that defines the movement of an aircraft, rocket, etc., under the forces and moments applied to it using the various control mechanisms and from the forces of nature.

[http://www.openeaagles.org/ Open Extensible Architecture for the Analysis and Generation of Linked Simulations]

Posted By Charlie read more

Cognitive Modeling in the Spaceroom

Apr
03

As one can find in examining the [[spaceroom-system-components|architecture of the spaceroom]] there are a number of application components as well as a component based system in designing the applications that handle the modeling side of things in the system. The current modeling is primarily focused on the physical systems of the ship itself, modeling such things as power generation and consumption by devices as well as the motive force generation of the engine system and shields. The physics modeling of the system is managed by the ODE library. Eventually the sound system using Direct3D will allow for realistic sound management as well. Realistic display is still a while off but could also be managed by libraries such as OpenGL. A piece that was missing was a component that could be used to evaluate the state of the system and based on rules invoke actions. This is a complicated process that requires the ability to define many rules that can be evaluated in parallel.

Posted By Charlie read more

A new website system

Mar
28

For quite awhile now most of many of the various parts of the site have been disjoint, a separate blog, wiki, regular web site, and photo gallery. With the new Drupal framework I am able to have all of the features in one place. This will reduce the different sub-domains I have had to use as well as databases.

Posted By Charlie read more

Working with images and transparency

Dec
22

First an update on the speech synthesis. I was able to create an HTTP plugin module that contained a speech COM object and make calls against it. All that worked. I tried to create a wrapper object, so that I could manage the enumeration of available voices and so on, but for some reason it kept throwing an odd error. For now it is workable with the default MS voice (SAM).

Posted By Charlie read more

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