Tag Archives: rocket

Resolving difficult issues

June 17, 2012   admin   3 Comments

For some time I’ve been copping flack from people who’ve installed unsupported custom ICS ROMs on their Android devices, because sometimes the touch screen stopped working with my apps, Solar Explorer and Exoplanet Explorer, resulting in misleading comments on Android Market such as “ICS fail” which are not true as the problem only started after the unofficial ICS ROM was installed.

Despite this, I’ve done everything I can to figure out what’s wrong, but I cannot fix issues in a custom ROM, without becoming a developer on every custom ROM project, which I don’t have time for. There is the possibility of working around the problem in code, but it has to be done in the Shiva runtime engine.

Shiva is the 3rd party tool, developed by Stonetrip, that I use to write my apps. It handles all the low level code for graphics acceleration, audio, etc., and deals with a lot of the “fragmentation” issues. Because the issues have only affected custom ROM users, Stonetrip hasn’t investigated because they don’t support custom ROMs.

To be honest, I can’t blame Stonetrip. There’s loads of different custom ROMs out there with a constant barrage of patches and hacks being released to get them running on many different devices with varying levels of success. It would be impossible for a company to be able to provide support for all these projects, ones that often feature little in the way of quality control because the ROM developers themselves have few resources.

Although my apps work fine on all the ICS test devices I have access to (running official manufacturer ROMs), in the last week or so I’ve started to receive reports from Sony phone owners of a touchscreen problem present in the official ICS 4.0.4 that was released earlier this month.

Thanks to a couple of users who’ve given me the log output from their devices while running my apps, I’ve been able to report the problem to Stonetrip, and after looking into it, they think they know a way of solving it.

The plan is that they will release a new Shiva runtime engine in the next couple of weeks, after which I’ll rebuild all my apps a do a new release on Android, and Playbook, although RIM devices aren’t affected by the problem.

At the very least it will most likely fix the issue on Sony devices, and with luck it’s the same problem that is affecting custom ROM users, and it’ll be fixed too.

The next update of Solar Explorer will also includes a couple of new features that I’ve been working on. In the current version of the app, although the planets are positioned accurately based on the date, the Moon isn’t. The new release will fix that and you’ll be able to see the Moon in the right location on dates that feature a Solar eclipse. There’s also been some improvements made to the planet position calculations so they will be more accurate.

In the meantime, work continues on my Rockets app, but at a slower pace because I’ve got a full workload at the office for the next few weeks. I have however completed the Saturn V since my last update, which was a lot of work, and by far the most complex to date. As usual, the payload is included, which in this case is a model of the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander with it’s landing legs folded up, inside the final stage, below the Command Module.

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Rockets of the Space Race: 14 rockets completed

June 02, 2012   admin   2 Comments

It’s amazing how time consuming drawing pointy cylinders can be!

With a reasonable variety of models nearing completion, I was able to finalise the process I use for creating textures and surface detail. This meant that I had to go back and slightly re-work all the models I’d done so far, which took a while…

It’s all done now, and the process of modeling is getting easier as I now know what I’ll be needing when it comes time to texture the surface of a rocket. Because of this, I’m able to “unwrap” parts while they are being created, before the models are complete, which is a big time saver.

I’m finding that the most time consuming process is still the research to figure out what the stages look like for some of these rockets. The early US ones are particularly bad, especially the vehicles that aren’t considered very successful. One source of information that has proved useful is the NASA technical reports website which provides scanned PDF documents of technical reports that were written when the vehicles were flying. Useful, but not great as photos in these documents look like they have been transmitted on an old black and white fax machine.

At least the line drawing survived the process fairly well.

I’ve yet to start serious work on the Russian launchers, so I’ll have to wait and see how much detail I’ll be able to find about those…

The app code has also been improved with some buttons added to control moving through the list of rockets and adding and removing of stages for the multi-stage vehicles. It’s still very simple and in now way representative of the final product, it’s just there to make it easier to test on my tablets.

Also, the rocket tally is now up to 14 complete of 32, so it’s getting close to half way now. Juno I, Jupiter, Juno II have been added in the last couple of days and work I’ve begun work today on Saturn I. It typically takes about a day to create a model, so there’s about two more weeks of work left… for the models anyway.

Here’s a couple of shots, the first showing stage 2, 3 and 4 of the Juno II rocket, with the gold coloured Pioneer 3 on top. Nothing too fancy there, just bundles of Baby Sergeant rockets (a small version of the military Sergeant rocket) securely strapped together. Pioneer 3 (or 4 – they were identical) is even attached to a single Baby Sergeant which is stage 4.

The second shot is the final version of the V-2, with a more natural colour scheme.

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Rockets of the Space Race: First test

May 28, 2012   admin   No comments

Today has been unusually productive, with over 500 lines of code written and tested, allowing the app to reach a point where I have been able to test it on an actual device.

I can happily report that it ran really well… in fact, it ran much faster than I was expecting it would on my old &” Galaxy Tab, because it’s pretty slow. Despite the mediocre hardware, and models composed of over 3,200 polygons, the app was pretty much locked at 60 frames per second, which is the upper limit that Android devices run at.

Thinking about it after the fact, it’s probably not really that surprising that it worked so well.

The reason is that my app is drawing 3D objects that are generally long and thin. This means that the user will only  see all the parts of a rocket when it’s fully zoomed out, at which time it will occupy a small percentage of the pixels on the screen, which speeds up the drawing process because the graphics chip works faster when drawing detail on a smaller part of the screen. When zoomed in, the user can only see a small portion of the rocket, which also speeds up the drawing process because most of the rocket isn’t visible.

It’s a win-win situation.

The best part of this revelation is that I won’t have to skimp on the detail when it comes time to work on the Saturn V and the N1.

Nice.

Anyway, I have to say, the models are looking really good on the Galaxy Tab, and it’s nice to see the metallic shading working well on an actual device, without any tweaking which is a bonus.

I’ve attached a “before and after” shot of the Vanguard to give you an idea of how the metallic effect looks on something besides the Atlas. I’ve set it up so that the painted parts will retain a matte finish so the whole thing won’t just be shiny.

The Vanguard TV-3 is an ugly beast, but it’s a good demonstration of the technique.

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Rockets of the Space Race: Atlas & Thor

May 25, 2012   admin   No comments

Two more models are now complete, including Atlas and Thor rockets. In both cases I’ve chosen to create models of the variants of these two launchers that did something interesting – for Atlas, I created a Mercury variant which launched the first American to orbit the Earth, while for Thor, I built the Able 1 variant which carried Pioneer 1, the first satellite launched by NASA after the agency was created.

Pictured below is the Atlas Mercury rocket, sporting my new shiny silver metal shader which will be applied to the other models I’ve created to make the metal parts look more metallic. This is the most complex model so far, taking approximately 18 hours to create, and as  usual, it can be disassembled into parts, including removing the retro rockets and escape tower from the Mercury capsule.

The polygon count totals 3,200 which is more than I was hoping, but there was a lot of detail on the Atlas that was simpler to create as polygons, rather than trying to fake it with textures.

With Atlas and Thor complete, there’s Delta, the Titan family, a few Redstone variants the Saturn 1B and Saturn V left to do for the US list. I’ve dropped Polaris from the list for now because I haven’t been able to find much more than a brief mention of  a possible contribution of guidance systems to other rocket and missile projects. If I can find something more concrete, I’ll add it back later.

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Rockets of The Space Race

May 21, 2012   admin   No comments

Well, a quarter of the rocket models are now done and they’re looking very good. I’ve further refined the technique I’m using and I’ve also added some specular shine to so that patterns and grooves created by the normal map are more pronounced.

From playing with the rockets a bit in the early version of the app, I come to realise that I’m going to have to alter the way the camera works from what I was expecting. Currently it allows you to spin them around their center, but that’s not really working well because rockets are generally long and thin so you need to be able to move around the rocket as though the camera is sliding up and down an invisible cylinder that the vehicle is placed inside of.

My latest creation is the Redstone ICBM which upon closer inspection is shares a lot of common features with the V2, most notably the use of steering vanes placed in the rocket engine’s exhaust. It’s been tough figuring out the colour scheme to use for this one as I could have gone with the drab olive green used by operational Redstone ICBMs (boring) or any number of different black and white patterns used by the Army and Air Force during testing.

Most of the rocket models so far weigh in at under 2,000 polygons which is good because it’s at the low end of my expectations despite them being quite detailed. The worst so far is the Bumper which is a V2 joined to a Corporal rocket, and that totals exactly 2,222 polygons, which is nearly twice as many as the Navaho model, despite the Navaho looking more complex. The reason is that the V2 vehicle has a teardrop and it’s hard to make a smooth curved surface using polygons.

For those who aren’t familiar with the capabilities of mobile devices, in my tests, a model with about 2,000 polygons will run well on any device with an 800MHz or faster CPU. These days there’s almost nothing on sale (that I’m aware of) that’s slower than this, so the app should run OK on just about almost everything. I imagine that once I get to the N1 or Saturn V the polygon count will go up, but so far, so good.

Finally, I’ve also decided to change the app’s working title to make it more descriptive and shorter. It’s now: “Rockets of the Space Race”.

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Rockets of the Space Race

May 06, 2012   admin   8 Comments

My next project is going to be another education app called “Rockets of the Space Race” (or something similar) and will focus on the rockets developed during the space race, starting with the V2. This is closely related to the history of spaceflight project that I shelved a few months ago as it will use much of the information I collected.

The app is going to feature detailed 3D models of the important rockets and will allow the user to break multi-stage rockets up to see the individual stages, kind of like those toy cars with the doors that open and close. General information about the vehicle will be included and rockets can be compared to one another, including showing specs and a side by side views to measure their relative sizes. They can also be filtered by country, stages and any other feature that I think is worth including.

It will also be possible to view them as a family tree to trace the lineage of different designs, which is pretty straightforward for the Russian programs, but a lot more difficult with the US as they used a mix-n-match approach of stacking bits of different rockets on top of each other to increase lifting capabilities.

This app will focused more on graphics quality and will be designed with HD tablets in mind, unlike my previous apps which began life when low-res phones were all that was on offer. In general, I’m going to use large textures and high polygon counts wherever it’s necessary. Without the need to display a dozen different objects in one shot, like in Solar Explorer, it’s going to be easier to squeeze more out out of the hardware.

To start with, I’ve created two test models to see how they look. These are the V2 in it’s WWII camouflage, and the US Navaho G26, a two-stage supersonic cruise missile developed in the 50′s which featured upgraded V2 engines in the booster stage that would later be used in the Atlas, Thor and Titan programs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I specifically chose the Navaho as a test because it is probably one of the worst documented vehicles – there’s no detailed blueprints like there is for most of the other rockets in the US program. This is probably because the project was abandoned before the G38 variant was completed, which was supposed to be the one that would enter active service.

Oh, and it’s being developed for Android and Playbook.

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The race to the Moon

January 30, 2012   admin   No comments

The past few weeks I’ve been busy designing my new app, a game tentatively titled “The race to the Moon”.

It didn’t start out as a game, rather it was originally was just an educational app, but I wanted it to focus on more than just the moon landing and present information like a timeline of events, the 18-or-so major achievements, the rockets that were used, the spacecraft that were launched and the missions and programs that were run.

Unfortunately, the original design quickly turned into the plans for a boring reference work, and lets face it, libraries already full of dusty books that document this period of time. The worst part was that it would have been a turn-off to the people I wanted to reach: those of us born after the space race was over, and those of us who have since been numbed into unconsciousness by droning teachers in high school history classes.

I scrapped the original plan, but kept the information I had gathered and decided that the best way to present it was in the form of a game. Make it interactive.

After trying to fit my data into a couple of different game genres, I finally settled on a “click management” style, something easy to learn and perfect for touch screen devices.

The game will be set in the period from 1957 through to 1972 and you will be in charge of the US space program. Your task will be to manage the launch site and payloads in an effort to follow or even beat the real-world timeline.

The rockets you will have at your disposal are derived from the five rocket families that took part in the 18 primary achievements of the space race, including less famous events such as the first probe to land on another world. The payloads that that you launch will be based on the real payloads, from real missions and programs. The events that occur will be presented in the same order that they occurred in history.

Because it’s following the real timeline, you are competing against both the USSR and the real US space program.

At the end of it all I hope that I will have produced a work that will give players a better idea of  the incredible achievements in addition to the actual landing.

I’ve already begun working on a prototype, and there’s still a lot to sort out, but now that the idea is in place, work is progressing quickly.

There’s nothing much to see yet because I generally use placeholder graphics while in the early stages of a project. I’ll post screen shots once it’s presentable.

I realise the world is littered with boring educational games, but I think I can buck the trend and make something that’s both educational and fun!

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