phib412@ut-emx.UUCP (Thomas Russo) (03/02/89)
We've got a couple of Personal Irises and I've got a few dog/flight questions. 1) I've heard talk of an "airshow" capability. How does one create an airshow and how does one view such a thing? 2) The heads-up display is great, but how do you get the missle lock to work when you're using it? I've tried it many many times and can't figure out where the target should be for the lock to function. 3) about that heads up display... there is a little circle with part of a cross hair which moves about as I zip around. My first guess at what this was (a sight?) appears to be incorrect. So what the **** is it? 4) On one of our irises (the one with the chintzier graphics) the radar shows an opponent in red if the target is above you, and black if it's below. This is fine when using the heads-up display, but if you use the other type the little black radar blip doesn't show up so well on the black background. Any way to tweak the executable (we don't have the source) to fix that? (BTW, I was told that the source is available if you sign a non-disclosure agreement. Is that so?) What follows is not really a question, but I thought I'd register my thoughts on this matter. It's really just a wish: 5) Isn't there a better way of doing inter-machine dogfighting than using UDP broadcasts? (like, broadcast once when starting up so other running programs can see you, then maintaining a list of addresses with which to communicate) Our network has hundreds of hosts on it, and UDP broadcasts at dog's rate bring the thing to a grinding halt. (Many of the older hosts respond to every packet with a "port unknown" packet. Meltdown city.) So, like, the only way to run dog is to disconnect from the campus net, which means that we can't dogfight with the other irises on campus, which is a shame. I know dog is an unsupported demo, but if anyone has the time to spend hacking it up to use some other mechanism it would probably be a good thing to do. But don't get me wrong: we love dog. Deep down, it is one of the secret reasons I encouraged the purchase of Irises at the center! --tvr ------ Thomas Russo Center for Nonlinear Dynamics University of Texas at Austin russo@chaos.utexas.edu but not before friday, when our disk is back up. (there's another question: Anyone have any bad experiences with those 1.2GB disks which come on 4Server8s? Ours barfed badly this week and had to be replaced, after only 1 month in service. Is this a trend, or did we just have really really really bad luck?)
blbates@AERO4.LARC.NASA.GOV (Bates TAD/HRNAB ms294 x2601) (03/03/89)
1. When you execute flight/dog add '-o filename' then everything
you do is save on a file. Make sure you have a lot of disk space.
To replay the 'airshow' add '-i filename', everything you did
shows up as a separate aircraft. You can chase the planes, fire
on them, etc, however, they keep flying as if you weren't there.
When the end of the file is reached, the file is rewound and things
start over. I have done this writing out one file, then, use that
file as input and also writing out a new file, thus combining the
old file and what you are doing now. If you do this enough times
you can build a complete airshow with lots of aircraft.
2. I can't remember having any problems with missile lock, but I haven't
played in a while and I usually don't use the heads-up display.
The heads-up version I have is a little 'buggy', and the
instrumentation is not real clear.
3. My guess was some type of G indicator, or some other type of rate
of change indicator. What is it really?
4. A lot of the IRIS demos and other software is available from SGI
and the IRIS Software Exchange. For $100 they will send you a tape
with the software on it. They have 2000/3000 and 4D tapes.
The address to get the tape follows:
User Services
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Mailstop 2U-420
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94039-7311
5. I had heard someone mention it would be nice if you could specify
which machines the information would go to, but I don't know if
anything was done allong those lines.
I hope this is some help.
--
Brent L. Bates
NASA-Langley Research Center
M.S. 294
Hampton, Virginia 23665-5225
(804) 864-2854
E-mail: blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates@aero2.larc.nasa.govmadd@adt.UUCP (jim frost) (03/06/89)
>We've got a couple of Personal Irises and I've got a few dog/flight >questions. > >1) I've heard talk of an "airshow" capability. How does one create an >airshow and how does one view such a thing? dog -o filename will dump a flight to a disk file, dog -i filename will read from a disk file, and dog -i file1 -o file2 will add your plane to an existing file. Beware: these files get big FAST. >2) The heads-up display is great, but how do you get the missle lock to >work when you're using it? I've tried it many many times and can't figure >out where the target should be for the lock to function. Dead center, same as without heads-up. There are cross-hairs at that point. The closer the better. Heads-up doesn't give messages so you have no idea exactly what's going on, but it does work. >3) about that heads up display... there is a little circle with part of a >cross hair which moves about as I zip around. My first guess at what this was >(a sight?) appears to be incorrect. So what the **** is it? True direction; this is where your plane is really going. >4) On one of our irises (the one with the chintzier graphics) the radar shows >an opponent in red if the target is above you, and black if it's below. This is >fine when using the heads-up display, but if you use the other type the little >black radar blip doesn't show up so well on the black background. Any way to >tweak the executable (we don't have the source) to fix that? (BTW, I was told >that the source is available if you sign a non-disclosure agreement. Is >that so?) That must be the model with only 12 bit-planes. It should also have rainbow-colored planes and the purple mountains aren't displayed. No idea how to fix it, although I'd like to try. There also appears to be other problems with the radar on personal irises (seems to be quite intermittent) and I suspect they are linked to color as well. jim frost madd@bu-it.bu.edu