10th Anniversary of N30 – ‘The Battle in Seattle’

when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

George Orwell Homage to Catalonia

The scene at 6th & Union, November 30, 1999. Courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

These days, one cannot think of the World Trade Organization (WTO) without thinking of protests and riot police. There was a time when the WTO was seen as another boring, opaque ministerial body which discussed treaties largely irrelevant to the population. The last day anyone though that way was November 30, 1999. At this particular meeting of the WTO, held at the Washington Convention Center in Seattle, more than ten thousand people organized themselves into massive protests which were opposed by the Seattle Police Department and Washington National Guard with rubber bullets, batons and tear gas, and continued until the end of the meetings on December 3rd. The intersection of 6th Avenue and Union Street, (where the Seattle Sheraton is located, which housed many of the WTO delegation) saw the most violence. The city’s handling of the events eventually killed the career of them mayor Paul Schell (who, among other things, instituted a state of emergency in the city and revoked lawful protest permits). Schell felt the displeasure of voters in 2001 when he was unseated by the more leftward leaning Greg Nickels. Then police chief Norm Stamper resigned his post, expressing regret for escalating the violence by his use of chemical agents such as tear gas.

The opposition to the WTO meetings largely centered around two issues – how the WTO acts to undermine democracy (meaning people’s control over their own lives and governments, not institutional democracy), and how the WTO agreements (such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which had seen its own share of heavy protesting in 1998) work to widen the divide between rich and poor.

More at the WTO History Project

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FSDSxTweak v2.71 (Patch)

Well, just when you thought all was well, the bugs show up… I had some issues with child parts and a few other things which I only discovered after the upload, so patch time. Here is the readme for this patch:

FsdsxTweak v2.71 patch for version 2.7
Dave Nunez (dave.nunez.za@gmail.com or http://davenunez.wordpress.com)

This is a patch to be applied ONLY over version 2.7 of the FSDSxTweak suite (available at AVSIM.com). It fixes three bugs:

1. There was an error with the way child parts were processed, so that you could not have, for example, an effect as a child of a visibility node.

2. I ignored the way FSDS renames parts with the same names so that you could not have multiple of the same effects or special parts attached. For example, if you have two parts named _attacheffect_fx_landing, FSDS will rename one of them to _attacheffect_fx_landing.1, which would break the effect. This has now been fixed so that I ignore any part ending that has _[number] or .[number] – so you can safely have _attacheffect_fx_landing.23 or _attacheffect_fx_landing_21 in your FSDS models now without it breaking the effects.

3. A typo was causing the _nocrash nodes to never appear.

Installation: Locate the file fsdsxtweak.exe on your system (by default they should be in the FSDS install directory), and overwrite it with this newer one. Double click fsdsxtweak.exe to ensure you now have version 2.71 installed.

There you go folks – be sure to patch if you are seeing some of your effects not appearing or similar issues. Download from AVSIM here.

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FSDSxTweak v2.7 Released!

Long time since I last had an update, but I think this one is worth it. The changes are all in the fsdsxtweak.exe central engine.

Here is what you can do in the new version:

1. Attach landable platforms to your models by adding a single specially named part
2. Attach effects (like the pic above!) by adding a single specially named part. This allows you to easily add landing lights, nav lights and smoke effects to animated parts, and lots of other things too.
3. Attach special SDK parts to your models – such as the aircraft carrier arresting wires and catapults (again, by adding a single specially named part). This is actually the only way to make an Acceleration aircraft carrier with FSDS at the moment.
4. Create new MouseRect parts in the models for your VC (again, by adding a single specially named part).
5. Create Visibility nodes in your models to control visibility of parts via custom variables (again, by adding a single specially named part).
6. Create NoCrash nodes for your scenery.
7. Attach library objects (defined by their GUIDs) to your scenery (for marinas etc.)

I have also added three tutorials to the manual to show you how to use everything. Download from AVSIM via this link.

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Nvidia GTX285 for FSX

Recently my GeForce 8800 GTX kicked the bucket – the fan had gotten clogged up with bunny fur (from two years of sitting about three feet from the hutch), and running Modern Warfare 2 finally pushed it over the edge – it overheated and fried itself. Although I was borrowing an old ATI XTX1950 that was running fine, I decided this was a sign for an upgrade.

I had read good things about the GTX285 card, which is one step below the leading edge, so I decided to give it a go. I chose the BFG model with 2GB of texture RAM – I know FSX uses a lot of texture ram (all those scenery textures, spec maps, etc all at 1024×1024 in 23 bit have to go somewhere…). The price tag was about $400 – wow, expensive, but OK. Then the gotcha – my power supply wouldn’t drive it (it’s a 450W model), so I had to upgrade that too. Add another $100 (but actually that was a good deal, because it is a Corsair 750W model, which normally goes for $180). I was a little anxious because I had read reports of people going from the 8800 to the 285 and reporting no change in FSX frame rate, but after working in a graphics lab for six years, I knew that couldn’t be true. Or could it?

Today I installed it all and tried it. I decided to be adventurous and up the scenery levels to max (just the autogen levels and scenery objects – I kept all my other settings the same). I learned a number of interesting things about FSX, graphics cards and performance….

1. For most scenarios, the 285 improved my performance between 50% and 100%. So overall, this is good.
2. Under Win7, there is no difference really in running DX9 or DX10 (same as the 8800), except that in DX9 mode you have better compatibility in terms of features.
3. There is a very big difference in performance between native FSX models and FS9 models. For instance, using the default 737 at Tokyo Haneda, I was getting 20FPS. But switch to the Overland 777 (which seems to have a similar number of polygons), and the FPS drops to about 13. With the Opensky 777 (which probably has more polygons), the rate drops to 10. FSX models will give you far better performance.
4. The frame rate limiter is very maligned. If you read blog posts a lot of people tell you to turn the frame rate limiter off, as it reduces performance. The truth is a little more complex. Let’s say you limit to 25FPS, and you are flying at 25FPS. If you turn off the limiter, the rate jumps to some higher number (obviously) – let’s say 40. Then turn it back on – you would expect the number to go back to 25 right? Not so simple – it drops to less than that (e.g. 13), and stays there – but only for a minute or two – then it settles at 25. I guess during the first few minutes the engine is calculating some budgets which eat into FPS. So if you are experimenting, give things a moment to settle. This begs the question – why turn it on at all? Simple – you need to divide up your machine between drawing the scene, calculating the simulation, doing the AI and generating the scenery tiles. By limiting the FPS, you cap the amount of resources used to draw the scene, and open them up to the other tasks. You will notice that with the limiter off, the “blurries” on scenery tiles take a lot longer to disappear – this is because you have not reserved any resources for generating the scenery tiles.

In general, the GTX285 is a very nice card for FSX (and it can run Modern Warfare 2 without burning out, so that is a bonus too). I suspect the GTX280 would perform similarly, as the specs are quite similar. Oh and as freebies I got a BFG t-shirt (in my size, what luck), and a copy (via Steam) of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Not such a bad deal.

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Things you need to know

How to prepare your pets for war:

More important information at The Oatmeal.

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Thanks Steven, Noam

An old friend from UCT, Steven, arrived with his wife Sarah for the weekend from San Francisco. Now Steven works at the Commonwealth Club, where Noam Chomsky was recently an invited speaker. So as a late birthday present, Steven got me two autographed copies of his books.

It’s always nice to see people from a previous life, and especially when they help put things into perspective and remind you how fortunate you are.

Thanks Steven and Sarah! I had a great time.

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Rabbit hutch progress

It is going slowly. The base has been done for a while.

Click for more sizes

Now I am working on the top part. I have the long walls (which are a frame with wire mesh) – still need to put them together with the short walls, the hinged tops, and somehow figure out a partition.

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Squirrel feeder Redux

So I posted how I had put up a little feeder for squirrels on one of my trees. Well, some chubby American squirrel put his fat ass in the box and it collapsed (maybe the feeder was working too well). So I decided to build a sturdier one.

Click for full size

About 20 minutes after I got it finished there were already some birds and then this guy came back.

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Starship VC progress

Been getting into the habit of doing just a little work on the Starship each evening. It is the only way it is ever going to get finished. I am currently focusing on getting the VC geometry and texturing done. I am creating gauges as I go along, but they are mostly non-functional yet (that will come later). Here is the latest progress:

Click for full size

Click for full size

Here is more on the project: Blog posts and Flickr image collection.

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Squirrel feeder FTW

Since I saw the trees in our back yard, I’ve been wanting to put a squirrel feeder in there. A couple of days ago I found an old wooden chocolate box, attached it to the tree with some long screws, and filled it with some bird seed. Success!

Click for full size

This little guy was munching for about 15 minutes. Then another squirrel came by, and a huge chase ensued.

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