Software Bisque Support Corner

I’m really starting to hate December. Of all the worst times of year to have a big expo, January has got to be the poorest choice you could make if you were trying to make people miserable on purpose. The basic problem is that everybody wants to have something new for MacWorld, including Apple (and us of course!). No new super powered MacPro’s for Christmas for you buster, you gotta wait until January! New laptops, new devices, the world is a buzz with new hardware and software products being released in only a little over a week. I was so ticked off by an advertisement e-mail I got from Apple a few weeks before Christmas; “Gear up now so you can write it off for the 2007 tax year!”. Please. Everyone on the planet knows that except for a bump in the number of cores, the MacPro hasn’t been updated in over a year. Intel has released the new processors, Stevie boy just wants something to yack about in January!

Well, if I sound a touch psychotic, that’s because there’s a good bit of that going around Bisque these days. We too have some shiney new toys to release on the world, only we haven’t been sitting on them, we have been working like mad the last couple of months to make sure we are ready on time, and that we don’t ship something “rushed”… talk about your basic conflict of interest scenario.

Seeker, the product for which I am responsible will have a nice (downloadable for free) 1.1 update out by MacWorld. Most of the programming work this last year has been geared towards getting the Dome version of Seeker ready. The update contains some very substantial performance improvements, as well as bug fixes to be sure. Most exciting is the new content for Seeker, there are several new satellites models and new moons. The Earth’s moon has had a complete face lift and is (if I dare risk saying it) the best and most realistic real-time 3D rendering of the moon I have ever seen. When flying to the moon, you can actually see the “man-in-the-mon”, or the famous rabbit (hey, I’m part native American, maybe that’s why I always see the rabbit before the face). Lochness has also contributed some more nice narrated tours, most of which show off the new eye-candy (and you might just learn something!).

I’m also responsible for two other very small “surprises” for MacWorld that I’m hoping won’t be “surprises” for Valentines day instead. If you see me at the booth feel free to pick on me if I’m only showing off Seeker (nothing like upping the pressure ante!).

Of course, I’ve saved the best for last. For the first time in over six years, a brand spanking new version of the Sky is shipping for the Mac. TheSkyX (Student Edition) is an OS X native (and universal) application that will run on both Tiger and Leopard. It’s the biggest update to TheSky ever as the entire application (well, the entire GUI) was re-written from scratch (which is why the serious and professional versions will be rolling out in a few more months). The user interface is also radically different from previous versions of TheSky (i.e. easier to use), and the graphics are stunning. One of our competitors is going to have to change all their ads in a little over a week ;-)

The old Mac version of TheSky5 was written by just one programmer, who left Bisque (and actually now works at Apple on the iMovie team). That pretty much orphaned Mac development for a time. This time, the situation is much different. A whole new set of cross platform tools and API’s has been standardized on, and just about all Bisque programmers are working on Macs at least some of the time (I won’t tell you who the one hold out is, but I’m working on him). Tom even bought one for home ;-) I’m not saying everyone is “switching” (but I’m not so sure Daniel isn’t getting close!), but the Mac platform is a first class platform at Bisque along side Windows. There is even a good bit of Linux work going on behind closed doors. Cross platform code tends to be more robust (has to be) and bug free because it provides an immediate test of code quality (different compilers, OS’s etc.).

TheSky has always been Steve’s baby, but I am proud to have made my little mark. I did some of the underlying OpenGL framework, and I have two small features that I will claim as my own that I’m quite proud of. The first is the OS X red screen mode. I just happened to have snagged the correct Apple developer at a WWDC lab, who showed me some undocumented API’s for doing this. The result is not even possible on Windows (no, it’s not some stupid red gamma ramp… which we had to settle for on Windows), and is unmatched by anything else on the market. Ok, yeah, I know it’s only red screen mode… sometimes I’m easily amused.

I also did the planets in TheSkyX when you zoom in on them. This was probably the hardest programming task I have ever done. The rendering was easy enough (didn’t even use the Seeker planet rendering code), but the math to get the poles correct as they would be seen from earth was quite a challenge (at least for me). I did what seemed obvious, but made a small error so it didn’t work. I then went on several wild goose chases, then finally when flipping though the USNO references, I saw a diagram that reminded me of my first approach. Turns out I was right to begin with, but had made a stupid sign error! (Oh, how I remember professors who would not give partial credit when you were only off by a single +/-… that day they were vindicated!). Saturn is my best showcase. The orientation of the rings, the extent of the shadows on the rings, they match almost to the pixel the images generated by JPL’s on-line simulator (which isn’t real-time). Oh yeah, my little magnum opus buried in TheSkyX ;-)

Come and see us, we’ll be in Booth #W-4341

Today I have been called for jury duty, and as I write this, I wait in the jury selection room. I brought things to do, but it’s not like you can plumb the depths of... well just about anything with the uncertainty of having to jump up any minute and be whisked off to a courtroom. I’ve just finished my November issue of Sky & Telescope, and so now it seems like a good time to update my blog. It is amazing to me that so many people show up for jury duty and don’t even bring anything to read. They tend to interrupt and start conversations with nearby people who are reading, or trying to answer e-mail ;-)

First starting with Sky & Telescope, the November issue has a nice review of Seeker by Joe Heafner. I don’t know Joe personally, but I’m a big fan of his book “Fundamental Ephemeris Computations”, and it was an honor to have such nice comments about my work made by him. Aside from a few minor (but valid) nits, the article was a great testimony to our hard work on Seeker. I think Joe will like our next release even more. In addition to date related issues, there are more moons, more spacecraft, and more pre-made tours coming. Some of the existing moons have also been substantially improved – I’m in love with the new version of the Earth’s moon that will come with the next Seeker release, the old one looks down right embarrassing in comparison. There are also going to be a lot of things from Seeker-Dome (tentative name) that are spilling over into the desktop version too. There are substantial performance improvements, and I can’t emphasize the word substantial enough. Some changes to how tours are managed, and a few things that I’m surprised hasn’t given us more grief (every programmer can tell you they find the occasional bug that surprises them that it ever worked before the fix).

Also coming will be support for the Space Navigator SE (http://www.3dconnexion.com/) I have received e-mail requesting support for this device, and Mark Petersen over at Lochness says he loves his (I had the pleasure of having dinner with him last week at a conference). I played with one of these at SigGraph and talked to them about Seeker and they said they would send me one after the show (and thus, don’t buy one from them there). I never did receive it, and thought about contacting them about it. Just before Triple Conjunction (see later), I just decided to buy one as they are so affordable, and I downloaded their SDK and sample code. It looks very easy to integrate, and at least for people trying to fly in a dark room (be that a planetarium, or a class room), it sure is easier than using the keyboard and mouse on a Mac.

Speaking of which, I might mention coming joystick support on the Mac. Seeker currently supports just about any kind of joystick or game pad you can plug into a Windows machine. On the Mac, this kind of programming is... well shall I say “barbaric”? There are many rumors and conspiracy theories about Apple’s lack-luster support of game (or game-like!) developers. On Leopard however, the API’s for this are much better (largely in response to game developer noise), and I will (eventually) add joystick support for Leopard. This still isn’t terribly high priority, but at least under Leopard it is something I’m certain can be done in less than a month!

My plan for the Space Navigator was to integrate it last week in the evenings. Steve and I went to the Triple Conjunction planetarium conference and I (foolishly) thought I’d have some down time to play with this thing. It’s a pretty cool looking device, and I’m mildly surprised airport security didn’t confiscate my suite case and have it destroyed in a remote area. Anyway, back to the conference, holy cow! Planetarians are a crazy bunch (I mean that in a nice way, and if you were there, you know what I mean). It’s non-stop from first thing in the morning to well after midnight every night. There was hardly time to stay on top of my e-mail, much less spend a few hours quietly plumbing the depths of some new SDK and hardware device. We were too late to get a vendor booth, but our friends at e-planetarium hosted us and were very kind to let us show our software in their dome, and put some literature on their table. Really, the e-planetarium folks (and in conjunction with the Houston Museum of Natural History) are development partners for Seeker-Dome (and some of them are rapidly becoming friends, and not just associates). Tony Butterfield is a super guy, and has tons of experience in dome technologies. I’ve learned a ton from him, and he has contributed a lot to my dome rendering technique. I had the great fortune to run Seeker and tweak code while using their mirror dome system (which by-the-way, is the most cost effective means I can imagine for achieving high quality full dome video). I’m excited too, because we are helping the Seminole Community College planetarium set up a mirror dome system. This is only a few miles from my home in Lake Mary, and it means moving forward, I have both a commercial fish eye system (thanks to Joanne Young at AVI) and now a 30’ full dome mirror system (thanks to Derek Demeter at SCC) available for testing and refinements. Overall it was a great and valuable week for us. We are almost certainly going to be at IPS in Chicago next year, and should have a dynamic duo ready to go that planetarians can use to supplement their full dome systems.

I’m still waiting to be called for a jury. Friends have counseled me on the various techniques to get out of jury duty, and I must admit to at least being tempted to spout something about cruel and unusual not really being unusual if you do it to enough people, but... alas that danged honest streak kicking in. One of the more interesting non-astronomical things Steve and I did was tour a cold war era submarine at the Pittsburg Science Center. It gave me a first hand look at the sacrifices the men and women in the armed forces make when they are called to service. Considering the zero risk of going home in a wheel chair or a body bag, much less the extreme hardship that a spacious air conditioned building presents... well, to shirk my one or two days of service would leave me feeling dirty and ashamed. I’d like to think I’m smart enough NOT to get out of jury duty.

In short, SigGraph is the world’s biggest yearly computer graphics conference. The venue changes (but is usually Los Angeles), but his year it was in San Diego. I don’t go every year, but having just had the fourth edition of my OpenGL book released, I was duty bound to make the trip this year. There are lots of cool and exciting things going on in the OpenGL world, but that’s a little outside this audiences interest.

An interesting aspect of SigGraph is that it is the largest conference of any kind that I ever attend. It’s five full days long with at least 100 different courses, paper presentations, sketches, poster sessions, tutorials, and vendor presentations. There is also a pretty big expo showcasing the latest and greatest tools for professional graphics applications, games, and movie special effects. An emerging technologies showcase shows off some pretty impressive up and coming technologies not quite ready for prime time, and more than a few that are obviously the result of excessive time and funding on someone’s hands. It’s like attending a science fair, where all the kids are millionaires.

Despite the wealth of things to see and do, I usually have more dead time at SigGraph than any other conference. When you’ve been programming for over 20 years, the word “advanced” doesn’t have quite the same meaning. I’ll start a daylong class in one room, only to find it’s only a summary, and not in depth. I’ll then move to another to find it’s really an introduction, and finally end up in a room with a lecture that I’d wish I had been in all day! At other times, I find I have a few hours to just do some reading or catch up on e-mail waiting for a good session to start. The paper presentations are usually the best, and I can usually glean what I need from the daylong courses by just reading the course notes (which they give us on a DVD-ROM). Sometimes, lectures just seem to me to be the most dreadfully slow way to learn new material (this does of course depend on the speaker, but 90% of the time, this is true). Plus, I’m a tad claustrophobic, and sitting pinned between 500 people in a crowded hot room, tends to dullen my enthusiasm further.

Steve Bisque came out for a day and joined me, and I give him the fifty-cent tour of the expo, and we watched some of the top scientific animations that had been submitted this year. My favorite featured a trip to the center of the Milky Way. If nothing else, a one-day tour is a great way to get caught up on the latest and greatest technologies in computer graphics today. Afterwards, we had probably the finest Sushi in the San Diego area at a place called Roppongi. A great way to end any day!

Of more pertinent value, I randomly met a guy from JPL who does astro-visualization at an educators “quick-take”, and picked up some valuable intel‘ on dome rendering and planetarium content creation. Now, this is amazing… at SigGraph there were some dome people. I’ve only been to one planetarium conference (so far), so my view may be slightly skewed. It seems two groups of people with similar goals would have a lot more in common, but the cultural differences between my two experiences are quite dramatic. And it’s not just that one group has money and the other doesn’t.

Anyway on the topic of dome rendering, Seeker-Dome is late alpha stage now and will be going to three (carefully selected) beta sites in only another week or two. I’m still shooting for Fall availability, but there is some dependency on TheSkyX (which is also going to have a dome spin-off). TheSkyX and Seeker running in the dome is going to be a great and sorely needed solution for a lot of small planetaria (or so we hope!). It is also the time of the “grand re-unification” when the major Dome push is over and Seeker as a whole (both pro and consumer versions) start moving forward together again. I actually have a decent inventory of new moons and models ready to roll, so you can look forward to a pretty decent point release before years end. Not to mention all the refactoring that is happening in the base code due to the dome related features. There are some significant performance enhancements coming that will give everyone smoother frame rates, etc. Steve and I are tentatively planning to attend another planetarium conference this fall, and show off our babies… I’ll have more to announce about this as the time gets closer and things firm up.

My first trip to San Francisco was also my first developers conference. It was July of 1992, and I was attending the very first Win32 Professional Developers Conference. I returned home with a beta copy of Windows NT, my first exposure to something called "OpenGL", and a different person. My assimilation into the Microsoft collective was complete. I belonged to the Borg, and I was quite happy about it.

Some years ago however, my Borg implants began to malfunction. This had more to do with my involvement in the OpenGL community during something affectionately called the "API Wars", than anything else. But, like a spurned lover, I was on the rebound and I found myself working on a Mac in the days of OS X 10.2. It started innocently enough... some e-mail, a few word documents and spread sheets. For me, using a Mac was a gateway drug to actually developing for a Mac. To make a LONG story short, today I can hardly stand to use Windows at all. This is no small thing to admit after having built my early career on having mastered Windows programming in the days of 16-bit Windows 3.0.

I go to many conferences, at least one a year. I'm a regular at SigGraph, the occasional Game Developers Conference, a few Microsoft conferences (in the past), and now this week I'm attending my second Apple Developers Conference. This is my favorite conference, and the best investment of a week's worth of development time I have ever made, hands down.

Last year, I thought it was a fluke. Having come to the Mac a few years ago, I struggled with figuring a lot of things out for myself. The hardest part is of course "unlearning" a lot of assumptions about the OS, how development tools work, etc. I was blown away last year by how much I learned about the Mac, and Mac programming. I had a decent amount of experience developing for the Mac to be sure, but a real development conference was an incredible leap forward. Perhaps it was because I was still somewhat new to the Mac?

Well, this year is no different. There is simply no letting up. There are sessions back to back chock full of info, inside information, tips, tricks, and coding techniques. Sometimes it's very difficult because for example today, there are three different sessions all at the same time, and all of which I really really want to go to... it's tough to decide. There are open Labs where Apple Engineers can help you with your code, or get going with some new technology. Both Seeker and TheSkyX have benefited from yesterdays visit to a graphics and multimedia lab. There is also a third Bisque "do-dad" I'm working on that I don't know if I ever would have figured out how to do if not for some hands on help in another lab late last night. It really reminds me of the excitement I used to feel regularly when I first started learning to program.

To help demonstrate some degree of objectivity... I too was a bit under whelmed by the keynote. Last year we were told there were some "secret features" coming in Leopard. I sure hope Steve Jobs wasn't talking about the new dock! I suspect (as do some) that something "big" was actually planned, but then dropped, perhaps due to time constraints and diverted iPhone resources. To be sure Leopard is going to be great, and the new development tools are going to make my job a lot easier down the line. I was however daydreaming about telescope control with an iPhone. The non-sdk was a bit of a drag... oh boy, we can make web sites for the iPhone... of course we can control a scope with a web page... so who knows?

I can't imagine any serious Mac developer not being here. The Mac platform is so rich, and the technologies so consistent and well integrated into the OS. After many years of Win32 development, I am really tired of Microsoft's "experiments". Too many times have I jumped on the bandwagon, only to have Microsoft totally turn things around a year or two later. Only _now_ do I realize the abuse I took as a Microsoft developer (insert evil maniacal laughter track).

Have no fear Windows users, Bisque will not be abandoning Windows. I'm just one part of the team, but proud to be leading the charge back into Mac territory!

Richard

My how time flies when your having fun. The SkyX (student edition) is going to be ready to show off at NEAF but it’s not shippable yet. Steve and I are going to share a one hour workshop at NEAF on Saturday to introduce The SkyX and Seeker, and then on Sunday I’m going to give a one hour more in depth look at Seeker and Seeker scripting.

Both of these new technologies use OpenGL extensively for their graphics. The SkyX is built with some pretty conservative assumptions to keep it running well on legacy hardware, even PC’s and laptops that may not have 3D chipsets or quality OpenGL support. The SkyX has an excellent fall back rendering mode that is faster, smoother, and looks almost as good as the fully accelerated OpenGL mode.

I have a pretty long history with OpenGL programming that began over 10 years ago when I wrote one of the first books on OpenGL programming (and I just finished the fourth edition!). Back towards the end of the .com hey-day, I joined space.com and worked briefly on the OpenGL support in Starry Night 4.0 (yeah, no kidding!). I was expensive and working from an office in Florida. Less than a year later during a layoff binge (when .com = money sucking black hole), I was low hanging fruit. This was the only time in my life I had ever been laid off, and I had survived some doozeys in the past. It was after this that I found my way to the Bisque brothers where I could ply my OpenGL trade, as well as my love for astronomy.

Steve Bisque deserves all the credit for the non-OpenGL fallback in The SkyX. It’s simply beautiful and a huge leap ahead of what he did in The Sky 6. Don’t even get me started on Chart mode! The first time I used it out under a dark sky with red screen on, it was almost a religious experience. My contributions have all been low-level, all the “artistic” touches are Steve’s.

****************************** Warning, what follows may be construed as a rant…

I have a lot of friends in the graphics hardware business (I once worked for a graphics hardware vendor too, and was once involved in the OpenGL standards committee). Many of them at ATI, where my two co-authors on the fourth edition of my book work as well. Someone recently asked on the message board about what kind of computer to buy, etc. for Seeker. The short answer is: get an NVIDIA graphics card. They aren’t paying me to say that. In the OpenGL biz, nobody has OpenGL support like NVIDIA. There is a whole slew of old SGI OpenGL fanatics at NVIDIA keeping the torch burning and making sure their drivers are rock solid, regardless of whether your playing games, doing 3D business graphics, or making slick animated star charts.

I hope my friends at ATI will forgive me for this, but ATI’s OpenGL support has never been stellar. As a developer I have filed quite a few bug reports to ATI, and I think only once did I report a bug to the NVIDIA developers, and that was years ago. ATI knows this to be true, and last I heard they were looking for a new OpenGL driver manager. OpenGL is a huge industry standard and they are taking a beating for this in the developer community. Their OpenGL driver for Vista is nothing short of abysmal. If you want to run Seeker on ATI hardware under Vista DO NOT GET AN ATI graphics card (yet). There were some big problems with their shader support that required quite a work-around (which we have if anyone needs the patch, so far no one has) with their latest drivers. They released their Catalyst 4.3 drivers for Mobility Radeon’s, and I filed a bug report because it would not install. They then rolled back to the 4.2 drivers (which would install), and a week later pulled them entirely saying that you need to get the drivers from the laptop vendors. Two of my ATI graphics cards would not run ANY OpenGL program under Vista with the 4.3 desktop driver releases. My co-author fixed the shader bug I mentioned, but it didn’t make it into the 4.3 driver release. I see just yesterday the 7.4 drivers were released, I’ll have to check that out over the weekend on my desktop home system that I have sacrificed to the Vista demon ;-)

Why am I chastising ATI? Because industry standards make life easy on developers. It makes it easier for us to create great applications that create demand for their hardware. When they give lack-luster or half-hearted support to standards, they make life difficult for us, for our customers… and for themselves. If you’re an ATI fan, we can make Seeker run for you. It actually runs fine on XP and Windows 2000, and we can run on Vista with some special work-around code that hopefully won’t be necessary for much longer. We also owe an honest answer to customers who are not traditional gamers. When they ask which graphics card to buy, we have to tell them to buy one from the vendor who gave us the least trouble during development of the product they are interested in, and the one who we think will give them the least trouble in the future.

Of course, none of this matters on Apple hardware. Apple writes 90% of the OpenGL driver regardless of whose hardware is being used, and I can only say nice things about Apple ;-)

Richard