Argh!

[Kojack]

On the plus side, they have a blender plugin for mocap. That's not possible if they had a closed source api (which is why blender has a reverse engineered FBX plugin instead of using the official FBX sdk).
On the negative side, I can't use PrioVR with a game that uses Havok, Fmod, Oculus Rift, etc, unless I get a commercial license (even if my use is non commercial). I can't write a plugin for Max or Maya.

Or I'm going to have to go the annoying route of bypassing the GPL by having their sdk be isolated in a different process with an IPC system (such as zeromq or nanomsg) to talk to the main program.

EDIT: I'm sure you are already aware of it, but this should be coming out soon: http://perceptionmocap.com/

Yep, it looks pretty cool. I would have ordered it, but I've already got almost a thousand dollars in kickstarter on the PrioVR and Stem systems, both of which are delayed. I'd like to receive at least one of them before I order a third motion controller system.

[c6burns]

EDIT: I'm sure you are already aware of it, but this should be coming out soon: http://perceptionmocap.com/

Yep, it looks pretty cool. I would have ordered it, but I've already got almost a thousand dollars in kickstarter on the PrioVR and Stem systems, both of which are delayed. I'd like to receive at least one of them before I order a third motion controller system.

Makes sense. I figured you'd know about that already, too!

The reason I will probably pimp myself out and then buy Xsens is the PrioVR and YEI demos all show some jitter in the capture. There has to be a reason that a couple Xsens sensors are worth more than the entire PrioVR system (or maybe there doesn't?!?! maybe the secret is in the closed source software they license you!). I've only worked with cheapy 6dof and 9dof IMUs (eg. from sparkfun) so I can't speak to anything regarding hardware. I just know that if I end up with jitter like I've seen in my final capture, I am screwed ... I'd have to do some kind of key frame reduction and hand editing in Max, or buy a MotionBuilder license which I really want to avoid. If I'm going to spend money on mocap to reduce animation workload, I figure I'll spend a lot and guarantee I am reducing the workload as much as possible.

Anyway sorry to hijack your argh thread ARRRRRGH I HATE WHEN PPL DO THAT!

[Kojack]

I had an urge to do some kinect 2 development. I got the kinect 2 out, started plugging it in, then remembered that it's windows 8 only. I don't feel like coding on a laptop or tablet right now (my desktop is win 7). Away goes the kinect.

Back to Lara Croft Temple of Osiris.

[Kojack]

Yet again I've started to get excited about something then found an issue that makes the whole thing pointless.
Well, twice over the last 24 hours.
First up, I was going to buy some things from NewEgg (they've been shipping to australia since april or so). But the shipping cost for 4 smallish light boxes (ip security cameras) was $593! That's more than the cost of the items! It would also push the price to over the tax threshold, so 10% GST and 5% duty on top. It was going to cost almost $1400 total for around $573 of items. Argh!

Then I discovered a new scripting language: Skookum Script, in the logo screen of Sleeping Dogs.
I looked it up, it sounds great. A high performance concurrent OO language designed for games. Then I found out that it's only available in Sleeping Dogs and an upcoming UE4 plugin that will cost $200 per developer for the full version (there's a limited version for free, but is still UE4 only). So I can't add it to Ogre projects without making some commercial deal with the creators.
I guess it will be useful when the UE4 plugin comes out (at work I have to deal with Unity and UE4 a lot now), but until then it's an out-of-reach curiosity only.

[Kojack]

Not sure if funny or ARGH!
From the OpenMW forum:

Ogre 3d IS irrilicht, a repackaged irrilicht that is.

[jacmoe]

To me Irrlicht is wxWidgets and Ogre is Qt - it's two different worlds.

It can't be Jannik 'scrawl' Heller who calls Ogre a 'repackaged Irrlicht' ?

I think it's more funny than argh, to be honest.

[Kojack]

No, definitely not scrawl, just a user.
I'm sure a lot of Irrlicht users would be pissed off that someone thinks Ogre and Irrlicht are the same thing.

[Zonder]

Well I when I read it so not an argh

[Kojack]

Two arghs for today.
First up: australia is making a new copyright policy. To make sure we're one of the worst countries in the tech world (since logging "meta data" of all australian internet users isn't enough) they are now going to block vpns and file lockers, because the media industries are freaking out about australians using vpns to get around geoblocks on services like netflix. People doing that are still paying for it though!
They don't want us pirating shows and they don't want us to pay for them. Make up your damn minds!

Second: I've spent the afternoon using UE4. It's hard to imagine something actually making me wish I was using Unity, but UE4 has managed.
I can't find any examples anywhere of using the C++ side to spawn an actor with a mesh. Surely that mustn't be hard? Maybe I'm just half asleep. But it seems painful.
I've got a custom actor class spawning. The docs say I need to add a scenecomponent to the actor, but they don't actually show how.
I've found blueprint examples, but I want C++.
In Unity, you set up a prefab by making an asset, setting it's properties, adding components, etc. Then with one line of code you can spawn instances of that already designed prefab entity. UE4 doesn't seem to have that.

Seems it would be quicker to just add a component system to my Ogre framework than learn UE4. But since my college is heavily embracing non-coder friendly engines, I thought I'd rather go with UE4 than Unity. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

Maybe this is how new users to Ogre feel. But most of our tutorials have examples of:
- create scene node
- create entity
- attach entity to scene node
That's what I'm trying to do in UE4.

[cybereality]

Even though I love UE4, debugging Blueprints is really quite bad. Well first off, you can't modify values at runtime, a huge disadvantage to Unity. Second, watching values is flakey and you can't just inspect any value you want. I wasn't expecting a full Visual Studio level debugger, but you'd think you could at least be able to inspect everything in a given scope, but I couldn't find a way to do it. I do really like using Blueprints over coding for simple stuff, but it's nowhere near as robust as it should have been in terms of the debugger and live editing. I think UE4 is great as a teaching tool, and could be much more approachable to non-programmers (who often get scared away easy). So I don't think you should give up on it Kojack.

[Kojack]

Seems the UE4 version of a unity prefab is a Blueprint. But that's a Blueprint, not a Blueprint.

By that I mean it's a Blueprint of an actor, not a Blueprint node graph script. Same name, but a little different. Although they are kind of mixed.

I'm currently getting some student art assets into a UE4 level to show them it in VR.
My laptop is struggling with UE4 though (still waiting for the new good one) and I can't run it on the classroom computers (imacs) because they are even weaker and I don't have admin permissions to install drivers.
(Unity with the rift runs fine on my laptop, but even a simple box room is slow in UE4)

[Kojack]

I've been waiting 8 weeks for a high end laptop (over $3000). I just checked this morning, their website is now just a little text box that says they have ceased trading!
It was a reputable local company, but now it's gone.

Now I've got to try to get my money back.

[cybereality]

That is the ultimate "Argh!". Thread is done.

[mkultra333]

Uh oh. That's real bad.

[Klaim]

I've been waiting 8 weeks for a high end laptop (over $3000). I just checked this morning, their website is now just a little text box that says they have ceased trading!
It was a reputable local company, but now it's gone.

Now I've got to try to get my money back.

Argh.

[Kojack]

Luckily I reduced the order a little by not getting hard drives, I bought them separately from someone else (UMart, great company for pc parts), otherwise it would have been much higher (I got a large ssd and might get a velociraptor if it fits).

It was a P770ZM Clevo laptop with desktop i7-4790K at 4GHz, Geforce 980m (8GB vram), 24GB ram.

I'm still waiting for my PrioVR and Stem kickstarters (they are something like a year overdue). That's another thousand dollars up in the air, hopefully they don't fail to deliver eventually.
The Pyra (sequel to the Pandora) is nearing release. My Pandora took 2.5 years to deliver (and that was after paying an extra $150 to jump the queue and speed up shipping), I hope ordering a Pyra won't result in another Argh post in a few years time.
(Pyra is made by the sensible part of the Pandora team, the unreliable guy is gone)

[spookyboo]

@Kojack: Too bad I'm about to buy a new computer myself. Makes me hesitating

[areay]

While not exactly a $2000 financial predicament, had a real derp moment the other day.

Was creating some .particle scripts and all was going well. I had an effect that used the scaler affector to grow the particle over time. Then I decided that I wanted a variant that decreased in size so where I had this in my first script

Code: Select all

	affector	Scaler 
 	{
		rate 3
	}	

I thought, well if I want to decrease the size I'll just negate the rate to get this

Code: Select all

	affector	Scaler 
 	{
		rate -3 //NB -ve rate!
	}	

Of course I randomly started getting the dreaded "assert AABB minCorner <= maxCorner" error. Took me ages to fix because of course I'd changed 50 other things between runs of the game. A few minutes with the debugger showed me what was up. The doco is clear that this is "The amount by which to scale the particles in both the x and y direction per second." so it was pure foolishness that did me in.

[Kojack]

Some updates to Arghs.
It was a while ago now, but the laptop thing was resolved. I got a Visa chargeback, recovered all the money. Then bought the same laptop from a company that still exists (Affordable Laptops in Perth). It runs great. It handles every DK2 demo I throw at it, although it's purpose is only partly VR (it's for classroom use, I move locations up to 3 times a day and need a highly portable system capable of VR and general games development).


The NewEgg pricing issues with IP security cameras was resolved, I used AliExpress instead.
Instead of an ok camera at $120 with $250 shipping from NewEgg, I got a better quality camera for $85 with $16 shipping.
I still need to get several more. I've already got a POE switch (16 port, 8 are POE). 3MP IP cameras are SO much better than the cheap analog cameras I'm using now.


I've also been in contact with the creator of Skookum (the scripting language mentioned above). They actually do have a free version of both the language runtime and IDE. The UE4 addon is an example of using the runtime with a game engine. It's in beta at the moment. I'm going to have a look at how Skookum and Ogre can interact. I'm not sure how suitable they are to each other (Skookum is heavily game oriented as far as I understand and Ogre isn't a game engine), but it still sounds interesting. Skookum is a compiled scripting language with language level concurrency, small memory footprint, powerful sounding tools and apparently " It beats the pants off other competing scripting languages such as Lua".

[TheSHEEEP]

" It beats the pants off other competing scripting languages such as Lua"

That is something I seriously doubt.
Lua has so many neat language features (with the metatable and the fact that everything is a table to begin with) and is so dynamic with that... that's hard to beat.
And when it comes to performance, at least LuaJIT is so close to C++ in performance that a better language would have to be as fast as C++ to be significantly faster.
With top IDEs like ZeroBrane Studio you get JIT-debugging in your program that embeds Lua.
What more can you expect from a scripting language, really?

The biggest downside of Lua is its somewhat strange syntax.

[Klaim]

My laptop is dying and I don't have enough money to buy one (in one time).

I think the gpu overheated once and since then it just shut-down immediate emergency-style when I run RockSmith for less than 5 minutes.

At least I can still compile and code but still... I had to reinstall everything recently because of a shutdown gone wrong which wiped out tons of system driver (don't ask me why, the disk seem ok and is from last year).

Meh.

[Kojack]

" It beats the pants off other competing scripting languages such as Lua"

That is something I seriously doubt.
Lua has so many neat language features (with the metatable and the fact that everything is a table to begin with) and is so dynamic with that... that's hard to beat.
And when it comes to performance, at least LuaJIT is so close to C++ in performance that a better language would have to be as fast as C++ to be significantly faster.
With top IDEs like ZeroBrane Studio you get JIT-debugging in your program that embeds Lua.
What more can you expect from a scripting language, really?

The biggest downside of Lua is its somewhat strange syntax.

I'm guessing it's mainly against Lua, not LuaJit. Although Skookum is a compiled language with multithreading.
LuaJit is pretty damn fast, but still not perfect.

My laptop is dying and I don't have enough money to buy one (in one time).

I think the gpu overheated once and since then it just shut-down immediate emergency-style when I run RockSmith for less than 5 minutes.

At least I can still compile and code but still... I had to reinstall everything recently because of a shutdown gone wrong which wiped out tons of system driver (don't ask me why, the disk seem ok and is from last year).

Meh.

Have you tried cleaning it from dust? The heatsink/fan on the gpu might be clogged.
If it overheated once and now has trouble, maybe the heat compound stuff has deteriorated on the gpu.

[Klaim]

Yep I did. But there is almost no dust inside (and I still did cleanup). After I checked inside I tried RockSmith agian with the same issue.


What's strange is that it don't do it with all apps using the gpu, so it might be because rocksmith uses a lot of gpu which could make sense because they do a lot of audio signal analysis.
I should probably check with other games too.

[Kojack]

My computer started blue screening yesterday. Every time windows tries to boot. Safe mode locks up, full mode blue screens. I tried using a dvd installer to run the repair thingy, that locked up too. After multiple attempts to fix it (chkdsk repairs, etc) the boot drive is no longer even recognised by my motherboard.
It's a 512GB SSD (samsung 840 pro).
Luckily I used it primarily for windows, program files and steam. I moved my user directory to a 1TB 10000rpm Velociraptor drive. I do all my work on other drives too (I try to keep the ssd for reading, not writing).
I've just ordered a 1TB SSD to replace it. I might still be able to get stuff off of it, I just haven't had time to really try.

[WilliamKappler]

My computer started blue screening yesterday. Every time windows tries to boot. Safe mode locks up, full mode blue screens. I tried using a dvd installer to run the repair thingy, that locked up too. After multiple attempts to fix it (chkdsk repairs, etc) the boot drive is no longer even recognised by my motherboard.
It's a 512GB SSD (samsung 840 pro).
Luckily I used it primarily for windows, program files and steam. I moved my user directory to a 1TB 10000rpm Velociraptor drive. I do all my work on other drives too (I try to keep the ssd for reading, not writing).
I've just ordered a 1TB SSD to replace it. I might still be able to get stuff off of it, I just haven't had time to really try.

That sounds like it could be bad memory. I doubt it's the hard drive if the repair CD outright crashed, I would expect that to report an error if it was the hard drive... but this is Windows. Maybe try a Linux boot CD with a memtest on it. Could also potentially repair the drive if that is it.

I once had a sector die in the partition table. Wiped out the structure of the drive, but left all the files. I was able to reconstruct the partition table and get off what I wanted. Then got a new drive... because even though it probably was just one partition, that sort of thing makes you want to keep 10 feet away from the device.