neidu3

And are there any you would support if you had just that little bit of extra disposable income?

From Dean Hall, playing around with navball config:

This new system allows you to write fragment shaders to "draw" widgets on the screen. All you need to do is write it in XML:

        <Gauge>
            <Component Id="Navball">
                <AnchorUv X="0" Y="1" />
                <PivotUv X="0.5" Y="0.5" />
                <SizePixels X="256" Y="256" />
                <OffsetPixels X="240" Y="-200" />
                <Rotation Degrees="0" />
            </Component>
            <Component Id="TBar">
                <AnchorUv X="0" Y="1" />
                <PivotUv X="0.5" Y="0.5" />
                <SizePixels X="48" Y="48" />
                <OffsetPixels X="240" Y="-200" />
                <!--<Rotation Degrees="45" />--> <!-- would need to use GaugeRotVert to use this -->
            </Component>
        </Gauge>

and these reference defined "GaugeComponents" can get reused:

<Assets>
    <GaugeComponent Id="Navball">
        <Vertex Id="GaugeVert"/>
        <Fragment Path="Shaders/Navball.frag"/>
        <Gauge Id="Fragment"/>
    </GaugeComponent>
    <GaugeComponent Id="TBar">
        <Vertex Id="GaugeVert"/>
        <Fragment Path="Shaders/GaugeTBar.frag"/>
    </GaugeComponent>
</Assets>

which this means is you can write fragment shaders (as an option) to make UI elements. THis is good, but also a little dangerous. If they are small - they are really chheap. but the bigger they get, the more expensive they are
In thiis screenshot i've "unlocked" them so you can see the borders

with this unlocked, I can customize it live, which helps me choose the values to put in the XML

you can resize manually, but in that slider is useful for more precise changes around the pixel etc...

Adjustments seem really fast and simple, both sensible tweaks, and not so sensible ones:

Keep in mind that this is an extremely early state of the game as it's pre-alpha. It's more akin to a tech demo at this stage.

From Dean Hall:

So I've been working on moving away from always using meshes and textures for things like navballs, and doing it procedurally - in this case in a fragment shader alone. Why do this? Well, that's actually a good question. Not one I have a great answer to. Primarily, it started (like much in this project) because I personally don't like the way games look today. Everything is all washed out the heck, its all like someone has spread petroleum jelly over the screen (shakes fist at Tim Sweeney angrily). Bizarely, my time making a lot of complex avionics for my Stormworks vehicles also factored in this.

"What if", I reasoned, "we could make it completely in the fragment"? Not only will it scale really well to any resolution - the nav ball will never have texture "pinching" at the poles, and modders could very easily replace any widget whenver they want with extreme ease. An added bonus you can see in this video, I can move the widget around very easily. To be fair, this would be true (to an extent) for a mesh + texture combo - but you can see it starts to look really great even when I scale it up. This has actually been a good example for me of the paradigm shift we face using BRUTAL. A lot of things get approached from first principles, which means you start asking all kinds of really weird questions and you end up asking what should i do?.

So whats the catch? Well, another really good question. I'm not a graphics programmer, but I'm tempted to say that this procedural shader willl always be less performant than doing it with a mesh + texture combo. However, whether you will notice the performance hit remains to be seen. This is because the entirety of drawing the procedural navball is drawn in the "fragment" shader, with essentially nothing at all from the CPU. No texture, no mesh (well, I do tell the GPU there is a quad - but it doesn't exist, it is just used to make sure the fragment gets called). This has all been quite a ramble.

If I do end up continuing down this path successfully, I can make a lot of widgets like this, which can then be used for IVA gauges and the like, and then rendered on a separate framerate.

Thought I'd share this with yall. But I'm gonna answer the obvious question right away: No, I didn't abuse it.

So, I used to work for a large corporation in the geophysics industry.. well, I still do, just a different one. I will of course not name them, but it's a behemoth in the industry, and if you are familiar with the field, you've definitely heard of them.

I wasn't the "normal" kind of sysadmin - I mostly handled off-site production stuff (where the actual money was being made), and how all of this stuff interfaced with each other as well as the head office.

The "normal" IT stuff was handled by a friend/coworker with whom I've worked for well over a decade in several companies - We have an odd habit of crossing professional paths from time to time. Let's call him Bob.

I had handed in my three months notice, as the competition had given me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I was on my way out. While visiting the head office for unrelated reasons I had gotten a desk assigned close to Bob's for convenience, as a lot of the stuff I did was related to his stuff.

Then suddenly, come 15:00 my VPN stopped working. Then email. Then everything else. If it had been later in the day I would've assumed my employer had decided to let me go earlier, but the timing didn't make sense.

Me: "Hey, Bob, I'm still working here, you know? Well, trying to..."
Bob: "Yeah, why?"
Me: "You didn't kill my access?"
Bob: "No, but I have a hunch..."

So, long story short, it turned out that Bob's American counterpart, Alice had been tasked with the offboarding, as she had set up some specialized access for me. And as you probably know, date formats between Europe and US can be confusing and ambiguous. So Alice had set up her offboarding-script with the wrong date. 15:00 was when her office hours started.

Bob and Alice had a quick chat and the problem was easily identified. No problem, and as apologetic as Alice was, I don't really blame her as it was an honest mistake anyone could've done in her position. Anyway, Bob was tasked with setting up (again) what I needed, as we were in the same room.

Bob started adding me back to stuff, restoring my password from earlier. Turns out users are never deleted, only deactivated so that roles can easily be copied. And after a while, which never struck me as oddly long, he seemed done.

Bob: "Try it now"
Me: "Yup, works"
Bob: "Please test them all... there are some modules that most people don't get added to"
Me: "I'll test them as I go. If there's something missing we'll deal with it tomorrow."

Things worked for the rest of the day, so I didn't really think about it. When the next day arrived I had some idle hours in the morning while waiting for some stuff, and decided to put the time to good use before Bob came in. So I started testing, going through all of our access portals. And in the name of science, I tested a few I wasn't supposed to have access to.

Me: "Bob, am I really supposed to have access to payroll?"
Bob: "No?"
Me: "Or the corporate drafts?"
Bob: "Wtf?"

Well, it just so happens that I share the first name with the CEO of the entire fucking corporation. And Bob had copied the access from the active CEO and not my own deactivated account. For 12 hours this random dork who was about to leave for the competition had access to EVERYTHING in the company.

Because I'm not stupid and because I didn't want to get Bob into any trouble I didn't do anything with it once I realized how much I had access to. I wonder if any of the other ~2000 employees would've been as sensible as I was.

From Dean Hall, a.k.a. Rocket:

ChrisH has also been cooking! This is a very WIP image showing this work off . It is still very WIP and chris has a lot of changes coming, this commit was moslty made so he could avoid merge hell going forward.

What does this mean?

Well pretty simply it means we can have multiple application windows open, on different screens and such. This is helpful if you want to have a window on one screen that shows, say, the moon, and then your vessel on another. It is also really useful if you want to make your own peripherals for the game - Flight Sim uses this a lot with aftermarket MFDs and other devices.

More to follow with this!

From Linx:

Here's my current work on terrain tessellation and displacement - this is what makes the planet surfaces look 3D up close and gives them that bit of extra detail. Right now the texture scale is too big so each rock here is far larger than they would be in real life, but that's because the terrain is still being worked on. This should give you an idea as to what we're working towards!

Given that the Moon is grey, I fully expect Discord to crunch all the details out of my videos so we'll see how that goes. I also have VSYNC on - the FPS is a bit higher than displayed and there are still many avenues for optimization to explore. Still very early on and a work-in-progress. Any vertex shimmering isn't anything to worry about, just a result of things being WIP :)

Looks like the building mechanic is in the works, weee

Back story: https://kyivindependent.com/cia-deputy-directors-son-killed-while-fighting-for-russia-in-ukraine-investigation-claims/

This picture is alleged to be the last picture of him alive.