I’ve shipped the flaky Gigabyte motherboard back to Amazon for a refund. I saw enough items in the review threads that suggested people have seen similar problems with this board that I wasn’t inclined to try a replacement. The ASUS board should do as well for my needs and seemed to have good reviews.

I’ll likely try to work in basic system integration tonight around base molding work on the floors. I’d like to see this come up and work reliably as soon as possible even though it will likely be a couple of weeks before I have the free time to do much beyond the basics.

This machine is ultimately going to live in the finished part of the basement where we have a large expanse of free space to work with an the room-scale VR can show its stuff without excess opportunities to trip over furniture.

I still need to get the GFI outlets installed down there to support the TV and computer before things can really be set up properly. I’m hoping to also have a second (probably core-2 level) computer down there to enable head-to-head gaming if the people aspect can be made to work. Network drops are already in place and should be working at this point.

Things are going to be a bit difficult until the office floor is done and the bookcases and furniture is back together. I’m planning on refinishing the top of my old desk before I’m done so this is likely to be further in the future than I’d really prefer.

I’ve just filled out a return form for the Gigabyte motherboard I’ve been trying to use in my VR development system. Half of the DDR4 slots seem to be flaky in the system. Much of the time it boots and recognizes both slots and then within a few hours of run time it hangs unrecoverably. The best runs I’ve had with it appear to happen when it completely ignores the second stick of memory and runs crippled in single channel mode with only 8 GB of memory.

Continue reading Giving up on the Gigabyte branded motherboard… →

Final phone swap…

I’ve successfully ordered a 128 GB Pixel XL to replace my replacement Note 7. I’ll be sticking with the Note 7 until the new phone arrives and just treating it carefully in the interim. Looks like the Pixel will likely meet most of my needs. I’ll miss the stylus and external SD card but I can work with 128 GB of storage.

VR Computer

The new computer I’ve been building to support writing VR code and testing it is not behaving well. I’ve had the machine loaded with software twice now and it is proving flaky. It runs for hours to tens of hours but sporadically hangs, often in nasty seeming ways. I have not changed any of the BIOS settings since I received the hardware and have done no overclocking.

Continue reading VR Computer woes and going Pixel-XL to replace the Note 7 →

I’ve had a Samsung series note phone for a long time. I like the size and I rather like having a high quality stylus for non-text notes.

I’m sad to see that as of this morning, the Note-7 has been discontinued and the replacement phones recalled. Now I’ll be looking for an alternative . I’m guessing that the galaxy S7 edge and the new google pixel XL 128 GB may be reasonable possibilities.

Continue reading Looks like the Note-7 is done for… →

I took a break from laying hardwood flooring upstairs to get the parts for the VR computer bolted together and loaded with an OS. All went pretty smoothly (though this morning I found that one of the cats knocked all of the loose screws onto the floor overnight). Loaded up the NVidia drivers this morning and just Steam needed to get this on its feet.

Continue reading New VR Computer is up… →

Didn’t get much on the software/sandbox side done this last weekend. Got my main computer temporarily moved from the office to the dining room so I have access to it while I’m putting the flooring down. Things are up and running, but most of the effort was on the flooring activities. The VR headset is once again packed up. It probably won’t come out again until the new system (parts on the way, to be placed where there’s more room to move around than my crowded office) is built and operating in the basement as that is a much better spot for room-scale activities in any case.

Got a copy of Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game with Unity and C# as Unity looks like the easiest on-ramp to get playing with VR. I expect that OpenGL/OpenVR will better suit my interests in the long run but I want to get started without burying myself in the low level details.

I really wish that speech recognition was in a better place. Looking at that tech a bit as it seems like something that would be a nice adjunct for VR…you have limited input capability as you’re not likely to be using a keyboard…being able to talk to the system, even if only in simple ways, would be nice. I’ll keep digging deeper. So far I’ve fond a lot of low level descriptions of the tech underneath (interesting but not immediately useful) and there are tools like cortana and such that seem a bit too packaged.

I’m hoping there may be some way to tap into these facilities and get access to a textual version of a voice stream and generate speech as well. Looking around and will update as I find things.

I’ve reconnected the HTC Vive in my otherwise mostly empty office as the flooring hasn’t arrived yet. I’m realizing that the office is a bit small even with almost everything out of the way. I had been planning to put together a downstairs (basement) computer for use with the headset at some point. I’m not seriously considering accelerating the process to get a more usable setup for working with room scale VR.

I’m looking at Unity as well as more direct OpenGL/OpenVR at this point. I think that the OpenGL approach is likely more interesting in the long run as I’m not currently thinking of things that look particularly like classic video games. I do want to get some initial development traction quickly though and Unity seems to promise a faster on-ramp in C#. My C# may be a little rusty, but it will come up to speed fast enough (and it is a useful environment in any case).

Continue reading VR Headset is back online for the moment →

Currently my home office has been largely taken apart so that I can lay hardwood in the room so my vive is packed away. I’m running through the other things I want to come up to speed on as I move forwards and the list is getting large.

Lots and lots of hopping around on my end. At the moment I don’t have anything here that I HAVE to do so I’m just hitting things as they catch my attention. In the long run I’d love to capture some of the interesting complexity of the board wargames I played in college and play with 3D immersive environments (not sure these two exactly mix). Add in the real world bits from 3D printing and such and that’s about where I’m at… Continue reading So many different bits of tech to dig into… →

According to Verizon, today is the day that my local store will have less flammable Note 7 phones to exchange for my current more flammable version. Looking forward to it as I really like the phone (stylus, large screen and micro-SD card meet most of my wants). I’m guessing that Samsung is regretting skipping the last item on my list, the removable (and thus replaceable) battery.

My existing Note 7 has been of limited usefulness for the  last couple of weeks as I inadvertently did a factory reset on it when I removed it from its case to take the SD card out in anticipation of getting it replaced. It hasn’t made sense to go through the work of fully re-configuring it  since then as it was scheduled to be replaced in short order. Continue reading Looking forward to getting a less explosive Note 7 today →

I find myself more and more adapting my C++ style to what makes code edits simpler. I’ve gone from:

void foo(int a, double b);

to

void
foo(
    /** One important argument */
    int a,
    /** Another important argument */
    double b
   ); 

to make DOxygen documentation cleaner to write and read.

Now I find myself considering this:

void
foo(
    /** stuff */
    int a
    /** more stuff */
    , double b
    )

as when I temporarily #if (0) out an argument during development or create a targeted overload, the comma really does generally bind to the second argument. Not sure I’ll ever warm up to this, but I’ve become used to other changes that looked really ugly when I first made them.