Charlie's blog

I got a wiki setup that seems to work reasonably well. It can be found here at Spaceroom Wiki. My main goal with it is to have a shared space for putting various design notes and ideas.

I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.

Development went on a bit of a haitus. I have just now been able to start reviewing where I left off. One of the key challenges is actually defining what the operations of the ship should be for the users. We have spent time on realistic behaviors of the ship (physics models, etc.), however I think for most people dealing with that level is not entertaining. I think the best way to is to go back and come up with some user stories about what a person would do in the environment. We have roles in mind, so I think that is a good starting perspective.

Last week Gavin asked me to come down for a visit, saying he had a surprise. It was a good one!

The Spaceroom got a major overhaul in terms of equipment last week. Through a surplus web site Gavin was able to get 10 Dell OptiFlex 170 computers for $96 each. We are now upgraded from really old computers running Windows 98 to only slightly old ones running Windows XP.

As sometimes happens I took a bit of a break from Spaceroom work to deal with other things in life. However last week I as able to get back to coding again. This time I added a new Shields component to the ship. I am appreciating the event interface system because it was very easy to add the new component and instantly have it sending data to the console application. I also added a new page plugin named Tactical which will provide controls and monitoring of the Shields as well as eventual weapons systems.

I spent some time expanding the console to do the RCS control, but also started to add some convenience functions such as Stop Rotation, and Set Angles. They are kind of cheats in a way since I just reset the values in the model as oppose to writing feedback control loop code, but I just couldn’t write PID controlers for this. Too much work, and I am not really interested in that much realism.