bekopharm

This works way better than I expected. This is a static image test for a HUD on my home cockpit using a dead cheap beamsplitter made of plexiglass and a smartphone.

This works by placing a smartphone (or really any kind of fitting display) below it. The beansplitting characteristic allows some of the light to pass through and will mirror whatever is on the phone display below it. The image is inverted though so a HUD mode requires an already mirrored display mode. There are apps for this but since I use HTML for all my GUI stuff I can probably just use CSS for this task. Most of the work was finding out how to get Firefox to do fullscreen (which can be requested via JS from a user interaction - so it has to be some sort of clickable element) and get it to keep the display always on.

A more advanced build would use a beamsplitter glass. This thing here is "designed" for cars and is according to the review a really bad product because it doesn't work well with day light or likes to slide around. All problems my desk does not have, of course, so I got this on a whim to see how it would look and I'm mind-blown with the result already 🤓 What do you think?

Originally noted at https://beko.famkos.net/2024/09/06/15629330/

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21415025

It has been a while that I tried Star Citizen. With the new Neuralnet Tracker plugin (AI haha) for OpenTrack we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try head tracking without a dedicated head tracker nowadays. And all that on a Linux PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

It has been a while that I tried Star Citizen. With the new Neuralnet Tracker plugin (AI haha) for OpenTrack we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try head tracking without a dedicated head tracker nowadays. And all that on a Linux PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

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@fk_tech shoved my nose on Monocoque today, which appears to become an alternative to Simhub: Cross Platform device manager for driving and flight simulators, for use with common simulator software titles. It supports e.g. bass shakers, tachometers, simlights, simwind through USB and Arduino serial.

And it works on Linux PC: https://github.com/Spacefreak18/monocoque

See a demo on https://www.youtube.com/live/GVghB4aMEmY by @fk_tech

I also jumped into their Matrix room (#simracer:matrix.org) and they seem like a friendly bunch too.

Mebbe worth to keep on the radar.

Edith says: Shorter videos to get the gist:

• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TznEHQ4lPZM
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t27kFte_fIE

Found this on my daily YT journey for home cockpits and I can get behind that channel slogan :D

Pretty wild how much know-how is laid out there. Extra kudos for using FreeCad instead of Fusion360.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/18462516

I implemented a proof of concept to add the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC. Apparently only TrackIR and FreeTrack (both Windows only) are supported so far. Still needs some fine tuning but I'm really happy with that single day coding frenzy considering that I didn't touch C++ in years.

I never did create a merge request so far. I'm still going to but it's really low priority for me rn :-/

This is a demo of the implementation with Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, a BSG mod for FreeSpace 2 Open. It's also on YT should you fancy that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB8lRV1m54

I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this.

Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️

Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn’t check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end – sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.

Note, not mine. Similar to mine. In fact totally down my alley :D

⚠️ grandpa gaming inbound

In 2020 I checked some old backup disks of mine and found to my utmost joy a copy of my former UT2003 installation. This is a Linux native 32bit build that is now over 20 years old. Well, LinuxGaming is hard because who can support 500 distributions, right? This worked just fine in 2020 on Fedora 31. Today I gave it another spin in 2024 on Fedora 38 on Wayland with PipeWire 😀

Hell yeah, the muscle memory is still there 🤘🤓🤘

(tbf the SDL1.2 compat lib rocks most of this but it's really all still there)

As an avid[1] X4 Foundations player I'm more than happy that I stumbled over @egosoft@mastodon.social today.

I couldn't find a cross referencing link from their website [yet] but I did check back on their Discord and got the confirmation by belgoray that this account is indeed official

[1] I'm really batshit crazy about this game - heck I even hacked it to sideload an UDP server to interface with my home cockpit 🤓

YT suggested this one to me and I absolutely love it. A whole cockpit on a budget made from cardboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09GdiFmaHq0

It's for civil aviation, unlike my own, and features some very neat ideas - like the fans in the ceiling, or [non functional] "fuses", for more immersion. It always impresses me how far dedication and skill go.