dirkderkdurk

A while back I kinda got Unreal Tournament running inside Unreal Engine, okay, more like a VM running UT inside Unreal Engine, but still...

For those looking for silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVO2VDPnI0Y

Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the keyboard. Ah, good times.

Original MK, Sub-Zero spine tear, sigh, the first one I ever did. Got me into gamedev. I appreciated it!

Way back, before the year 2000, I desperately wanted to make my own stick figure death animations, but I was too lazy, and being in South Africa, we couldn't get any useful software.

I did however manage to get Delphi Personal Edition off a cover CD from a magazine grey-imported from up-north.

I proceeded to create "TISFAT" (This is Stick Figure Animation Theatre) in Delphi, inventing my own "inverse kinematics" algorithm, quotation marks not only because I had no idea what that was at the time, but I also had no way to look it up, and it was ghastly (the day I found out what atan2 did unlocked everything!).

Being a cocky teenager, I thought, "this is great!" and sent it to the local version of "PC Format" magazine and got it on the local coverdisc.

That's when I first learnt several very important things about having users! Always -always- version your file formats!

Anyway, it somehow made its way onto "the world wide web", and someone set up a forum about it, and a small community built around my bug-ridden app. Then the religious wars of "Pivot vs. TISFAT" started, so I reached out to the author of Pivot just to say I wasn't any part of it, and I'd be keen to add support for the Pivot file format.

Later on I learnt about verlet particle physics, made better "IK", made a Pascal wrapper for the Chipmunk physics library, allowing me to add physically-driven animation creation.

I look back with awe at younger me, because I wouldn't have the energy to power on like I did, and I'd think more-than-twice about showing anyone my work nowadays (I have the physical Winamp part 2 video basically done, but the fear of showing it in public is holding me back).

You can still find videos created with TISFAT on YouTube, and I've still got a complete rewrite sitting on a HDD somewhere, where I planned a "no UI" way of animating, targeting all the "new" multi-touchscreens back then...

Ah, good times.

I'm currently doing tiny bits of way too many projects, so I'm as reliable as Trumpet Winsock sadly. But we could encourage each other to stop procrastinating!

I'm using a Pi Pico now with a stepper motor (no video of it yet), and it's super smooth, indeed!

I was thinking about using a "SoftPot Membrane Potentiometer" to bring the chonkiness down a little, where the knob on the front would have a little nub at the back which would press against the strip and give you the same kind of effect (but then you need a way to drive that nub, of course).

I also thought about using the stepper motor and spiral combo out of a CD-ROM drive, maybe putting an encoder on it, but the spiral isn't long enough, so meh.

I'm still waiting for screens from AliExpress before I make an updated video, otherwise it'd just be, "look, it's smoother now, yay".

Hah! I'm working on something very similar!

The screens are by far the most tricky part to get right, size and positioning. At first I thought about using one of the super thin Sony mobile screens for the entire thing, then using an overlay to separate them, annnd then to make it tactile with knobs, the knobs would touch the screen, and the phone would send the co-ords to the playback device (RPi in my case).

But that's because I wanted a very "thin" end product. Making it deeper allows for some more creative layout.

I've settled on a linear potentiometer driven by a stepper motor, and it's working out for me so far!

Good luck with yours! Got any links to follow it on?

Here's mine FWIW: https://youtu.be/GjmFbgqFeMQ

I'm working on my own version that's going to be all buttons and sliders, but I'm hesitant to mention this anywhere because I'm only working on this sporadically as a learning exercise, and the first video already got me more attention than I thought I'd get.

Since then I've changed to a Pi Pico, and using PIO (programmable pins) makes the touch-delay problems I had magically go away. PIO really is awesome.

I've also replaced the DC motor with a tiny stepper motor, and now everything works peachy. Just waiting for some screens and stuff from AliExpress.

Anyhoo, shooting myself in the foot: https://youtu.be/GjmFbgqFeMQ

This is so neat! I'll have to incorporate it into my Unreal Engine x86 emulator plugin menagerie!

https://youtu.be/yVO2VDPnI0Y (the first 1.5 minutes are fine to watch, the rest is of dubious worth)

You could also try using ODBC or ADO.NET. I've not used the latter, but ODBC was my goto for this kind of thing a decade or so ago. So mileage may vary drastically, and there might be roadkill along the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_Connectivity