Edit: fuck, the first video’s been taken down. i’m not making any money out of this blog, you stupid record labels!

Edit 2: yeah!! a counter-dispute and the video is back online! let’s see how long it lasts..

Ahora lo que es en castellano: un par de viejos videos, de cuando solía quemar rueda (virtual) semanalmente, en este caso con RBR.  Gracias a Darth Joules y Geert por la captura y edición, y Eero por el brutal motor físico que programó a contrarreloj para SCi y que aún hace vibrar a la comunidad. Una pena que el código se haya perdido en el limbo legal gracias a los 6 años de abandono, los Ferraris de dudosa legalidad estrellados, la mierda que salpicó a Warthog Studios por sus relaciones con cierta mafia sueca de blanqueo, las detenciones de algunos CEOs y los consiguientes enchironamientos, y weno… mejor no seguir que escribo un libro

Richard Alexander Burns

January 17, 1971 – November 25, 2005

R.I.P.

Fortunately, a few days ago I stumbled upon a thread discussing the usability of the wheel under GNU/Linux, and someone had kindly posted some links to the VDrift forums (great sim btw), where most of the previous discussions regarding the G25 had been held. It seems that some guy had released a tool that allows to use all the features of this awesome steering wheel.

Skimming through its code (yeah, it was realeased in source code form, under public domain and LGPL!), it seems to send some binary data that initializes the so called extended mode, which is not enabled by default. It looks like someone has spent some serious time sniffing through USB traffic…

Anyway, the thing is that the tool does work, and so the G25 is now much more usable under GNU/Linux! Except for one thing: trying to set the 900º rotation mode, a process during which some usb or hid driver seems to freak out and remove the steering wheel device nodes

Force feedback is supposed to have been working for some time now, but due to the aforementioned initial problems, I never really bothered to test it much (I did patch the kernel to see if the existing FFB drivers would work for the G25, and the basic effects worked, but there was no point on finding a driving game that used them).

Just in case it disappears from tha interwebs, i’m hosting the tool myself. The usage is pretty simple:

1. Download the GNU/Linux Logitech G25 extended mode enabler tool (46KB) archive.
2. Extract its contents anywhere, and cd to it.
3. Compile: ./build.sh
4. Run the tool: ./usbtools g25-set-extended-mode

And that’s it. Make sure you run jscalibrator the first time in order to calibrate and remove any nasty deadzones on all axis. For more info, simply run ./usbtools without parameters.

Now i just gotta wait for Wine to properly support forcefeedback so that i can enjoy Live For Speed the way it’s meant to

Happy racing!

There are a lot of ideas floating around. You can read about a couple of those new ideas here. However, I’m going to talk about something which you won’t find there: generation of real world 3d geometry and textures on the fly, with an unlimited level of detail.

Yeah, sounds gorgeus at first. But it’s not so gorgeus as it’s difficulty to code and get right (i guess).
The idea is to:

1. Find a free (CC-licensed if possible) source of Earth data. We need both 2d textures and a 3d model, which can usually be found in the form of (unfortunately) freaking low-res textures and freaking low-res heightmaps.
   Possible sources:
   Google Earth:
   
   World Wind:
   
   FlightGear Flight Simulator:
   

   Ok, so that has nothing to do with fractal worlds.

2. That’s where procedural contents come into play. Take a library such as LibNoise, take the aforementioned freaking low-res contents, mix them all in a bowl on the fly, and you can get 3d meshes and 2d textures with any level of detail you may want, perfectly consistent and reproducible across different computers.
3. But this is a vehicle sim, so we must add some roads.
   Google Maps provides some road maps (as do many other websites such as Guia Campsa, but their data most probably can’t be used without paying royalties first)
   Then there’re some professionals who work creating landxml-compatible sets, which sometimes are not even possible to buy.
   And then there’s data created by regular people with their GPS-equipped cars, for example Open Street Maps.

   Once we got some good (or bad) road data, we drop it over the heightmap we got from point 1), seamlessly integrating it by using 3d mesh data and blended textures, and add some detail (bumps, side bankings, curbs, dust, camber, variable surface properties, …) in order to make the ride a bit more interesting.

Sounds easy, does it? Of course NOT. But it’s just a rough idea of what could be done in, say 23 years or so.. give or take a day

Enough dreaming for now, I should go study something about OSs (Operating Systems, not Open Source Software!

See ya!

Ps: yup, I’ve finally decided to write some posts in English, as I find it easier to find the words for technical subjects such as the one in this article. Plus English is a more efficient language when it comes to bandwidth!