My Big Expensive Toy

If, like me, you have an inexplicable fascination with blinking lights, you can imagine the joy of working at my job. The photo to the right is my Dell rack with somwhere near 20Ghz of processing power at my fingertips. The white thing on top is a wireless access point, we put a hole in the roof and erected a big antenna and broadcast out free Internet access.

But it doesn't stop there. When I come home from work I fiddle with even more wires and buttons and shiny metal objects. I even do side jobs wiring together people's computers and home theater systems. I'm also a racing fanatic, not the NASCAR dad type though. There is something appealing to me about being in a position where there are major consequences for a mistake. It's a way of motivating myself and focusing. For instance, if I procrastinate at work it's a game of finding my limits. How long will it really take me to code this thing. Racing is about finding the limits of your car and your ability. Driving ability is based on reflexes but also on a knowledge of the car, anticipation. It absolutely saturates the senses like few things do. Even skydiving is a fairly thoughtless endeavour in comparison. So I'm taking the things I love and fusing them together. The driving simulator I'm working on draws on my knowledge from software, networking, home theater installs and cars. We're currently having a debate about the best way to optimize online racing. Here is some of the chat log in case you're wondering how games are made.

"
	Kirk	we take different lines through turns but they're just about the same in terms of lap times
	STenyaK	or we can store the car format in a spacially special way, so that the car rolls out of the truck, with a side-view of it, as the mesh is loaded ;)
	Kirk	Hey, we can use haba's wireframe mode
	Kirk	like the ghost car in rbr
	Heson	progressive mesh, you start the race against a couplöe of shoe boxes and finish against super nice cars...
	Kirk	I was thinking we should have a bandwidth LOD for online racing. You send more position data to the closest cars
	STenyaK	hmm nice idea
	Heson	iteresting
	STenyaK	possibly relative to distance and camera view angle
	STenyaK	can't remember the technical name
	STenyaK	FOV
	Heson	and more detailed(heavier) prediction on close cars, its not so important if the far cars warp etc.
	STenyaK	yeah. that's a really good idea, i like it :)
	STenyaK	maybe we can extend it to other sytems..
	STenyaK	like... err.. well, there isn't much left.AI and sound
	STenyaK	we can also compress data of "groups of cars" and send just one position (for packs semi-distant cars in nascar for example)
	Heson	When trying to sleep yesterday I got an idea for a first generation online support for motrosport.
	Heson	just connect to irc and send coordinates to the chat
	Kirk	Now there's an interesting proposition
	STenyaK	how many commands would be needed for that?
	STenyaK	join - send messages - quit ?
	STenyaK	i don't know the irc protocol very well
	Heson	not much more
	STenyaK	does it use compression?
	STenyaK	(irc
	Heson	no compression in irc
	Heson	but we can implement some if we need to send lots of data
	STenyaK	position: 32x3, rotation 32x4
	STenyaK	(or 64 bits each
	STenyaK	224 bytes per car for upload
	STenyaK	plus synchronization
	Heson	for a first generation, that might look like the rbr one its enough
	Heson	and we can extend it and test concepts,
	STenyaK	hmm what latency is there in irc, average?
	STenyaK	i mean, the added latency
	Heson	when we need to lower latency we keep irc for lobby and move the rest to direct connections
	Heson	the added latency is abut doubled, i think.