Re: Hi - just checking
Wow, I just sent the checking mail to see whether something was wrong with my subscription to the group and it seems it was like poking a stick into a hornets nest (in a positive sort of way) - over 40 mails in the last few days on the group. It's just great to see everyone is alive and kicking out there. Ian - Original Message - From: Ian Spencer To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 4:10 PM Subject: Hi - just checking Not heard anything on the group for quite a while so just thought I would send a 'test' to check it's not me that's got a problem and say hi to everyone. I know you've all taken your Sam's to the beach and so no activity on the group. Ian
RE: sam birthday projects
Cue Entropy - clouds of vapour anyone? ;-) Van: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no namens Andrew Collier Verzonden: ma 2009-08-03 23:40 Aan: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Onderwerp: Re: Hi - just checking On 31 Jul 2009, at 18:46, LCD wrote: maybe everyone is busy with their next SAM Mega hit game? ;-). Actually, it's funny you should mention that Andrew -- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ winmail.dat
RE: Hi - just checking
I guess when the clocks go back in October SAM users will hibernate over the winter until next August! From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Ian Spencer Sent: 04 August 2009 08:04 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hi - just checking Wow, I just sent the checking mail to see whether something was wrong with my subscription to the group and it seems it was like poking a stick into a hornets nest (in a positive sort of way) - over 40 mails in the last few days on the group. It's just great to see everyone is alive and kicking out there. Ian - Original Message - From: Ian Spencer mailto:ian.spen...@freenet.de To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 4:10 PM Subject: Hi - just checking Not heard anything on the group for quite a while so just thought I would send a 'test' to check it's not me that's got a problem and say hi to everyone. I know you've all taken your Sam's to the beach and so no activity on the group. Ian
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
Blimey, this list's getting busier!! THE_WUB WROTE: As for my coding antics, as a newbie I doubt there is much I can provide except for laughs :) But I can definitely write a little about the system I've come up with for arranging my data, maybe with a view to someone more experienced pointing out exactly how badly I've done things... Someone once said that if you give ten programmers a task you're likely to end up with ten different ways to achieve the same result! ;-)) This is especially true with assembly language, where there is rarely any hand holding or libraries available. It's just you and the CPU!! It's also worth mentioning that in assembler there is often no right way of doing things. In fact, to get the very best out of a machine like the SAM it's often advantageous to do things in ways which would be frowned upon by textbook programmers. Again, that's the beauty of assembler, you have a totally free hand to do as you please!! So, don't underestimate your code! If it does the job you intended, and it does it well, then who says it's a bad way of doing things? Sure, perhaps your code could be a little neater? Or maybe it could be a little more optimised? But most people will never see the code, so does any of that really matter? It's what they see on-screen that counts!! Carry on coding... You know it makes sense! ;-)) Chris...
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
you havent managed to squeez a three player verison out of the sams screen have you the blocks are only attribute squares after all pity no one put letters on teh blocks so that as a line or more is wiped off you get a kind of scabble letter game to play for a bonus - and a bit of a wrest from joystick wrangling im amazed no one used the 32k sam rom and some algorithms to see just how many english words could be seeded from the rom source they fitted 700,000 on a sam disc for a spell checker for outwrite and secretary but no plurals pity it hasnt been moded for the atom lite bought towo from edwin and a comms interface get back to uk and find my keyboards have packed up! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRGnYWuOM5M was hoping to develop pop and lemmings but need to sit down with the pic controller board first unless you could explain how to disassemble 128k spectrum software? 2009/8/3 the_wub ! the...@gmail.com: Hi all, I'm a new member to the mailing list and since there's been some activity over the last few days I thought now was a good time to stop lurking and say, hey! to everyone. My name is Rob, I'm 32 and live in the south of England. I'm currently working as a panel wirer/wire man for a sub-contracting electrical firm. I was a speccy user back in the day and desperately wanted the Sam when it came out. Long story short, it was too expensive and I ended up with a second hand Sega Master system instead. I still have a Sam scrapbook I put together from magazine cuttings in the loft somewhere, and I could (but won't) tell you about a highly embarrassing letter I wrote to Bruce Gorden when I was twelve that, to this day, I still cringe thinking about :) Last year I won a nice boxed Sam Coupe on ebay with one floppy drive and a pile of disks and I can honestly say that life's much better now. I have lots to say about what I missed out on by not having the Sam in '89-'90 but I'll save all that. The important thing is that I've been learning to program z80 since it arrived and am just finishing my first, actually playable, game! I'm sorry that it's tetris but as a consolation prize it's a two player tetris on one Sam, loosely based on the vs mode from the old Gameboy tetris. I hope that's enough for an introduction. I feel a bit like I'm turning up to a party 20 years late with only a bottle of Blue Nun to show for myself, but I'm looking forward to finally getting involved in the community and catching up on all those lost years!
Re: SAM's 20th Birthday
I was only 9 years old, but I believe that I received an MGT Sam with a disk drive for £200 somewhere around October 1990. Is that possible? On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Andrew Collierand...@intensity.org.uk wrote: On 3 Aug 2009, at 20:23, Adrian Brown wrote: I remember selling my spectrum to part fund my sam and living without a computer for 5 months running up to the release of the sam before i could afford one :) Those were horrible days, but all worth it when i got the sam - even though it didnt have a disk drive, i could only aford the tape version. Defenders of the earth on tape- that was a painful load :) I don't remember precisely when I got mine - probably towards the end of 1990 since it was definitely after Sam Computers Ltd started up when you could get the Sam with a disk drive included for under £200, which I did. Eee, luxury, I can hear you cry - and maybe that's true, but I'll tell you the disk drive was not the world-changing first impression which tape owners might have you believe. You see, the instructions for the disk drive said that the first things you must do is to backup the boot disk - and, being the sort of nice boy who would read instructions and follow them, that's exactly what I started by doing. In fact there was even an option on the boot menu to do it; you would think this would run some semi-efficient disk copying routine? I later discovered that all it did was to run COPY * TO * and in the days before MasterDOS this involves swapping the floppy disks back and forth for every individual file on the disk. So there I am, dutifully swapping between one floppy disk and another floppy disk for what seemed like hours, wondering whether I was going to wear out the floppy disks eject button on the first day, and this was before I had even run Flash! or listened to the MGT anthem... Oddly enough, one of the first BASIC programs I wrote was a simple disk copier which used READ AT and WRITE AT to read half a disk at a time into memory and duplicate a disk in only two swaps. It wasn't fast, but it was way easier than SamCo's approved method at the time... Andrew -- http://www.intensity.org.uk/
Re: SAM's 20th Birthday
lucky you didnt experience the external dirve interface the one supposedly compatible with the +d external drive different from the internal one which wiped the data you just saved off the disc if you left it in thte drive and pressed reset! anyone done any networking? 2009/8/2 Chris Pile chris.p...@blueyonder.co.uk: Hi folks... There was a thread a while ago mentioning the SAM's 20th birthday. When exactly is the 20th anniversary of the machine? Chris...
RE: SAM's 20th Birthday
I had an internal and an external drive (because I had a speccy DISCiPLE disk interface) - both worked fine - as long as you did indeed not reset with a disk / disc in the drive. Edwin Blink's DPU (disk protector unit - http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/edwin/hardware/dpu/dpu.htm) worked a charm. But as with all things you are used to, it took a while before actually having the courage to leave the disk in the drive... :) Roger - is your keyboard missing the full stop and comma keys? -Original Message- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Roger Jowett Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 16:31 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SAM's 20th Birthday lucky you didnt experience the external dirve interface the one supposedly compatible with the +d external drive different from the internal one which wiped the data you just saved off the disc if you left it in thte drive and pressed reset! anyone done any networking? 2009/8/2 Chris Pile chris.p...@blueyonder.co.uk: Hi folks... There was a thread a while ago mentioning the SAM's 20th birthday. When exactly is the 20th anniversary of the machine? Chris...
Re: Hi - just checking
Am I replying to the correct thread? I don't know. But I've had the opposite experience to a bunch of people here, having become substantially more busy in my work than I was even just a few months ago, squeezing the SAM temporarily out. A version of my vector 3d-stuff-as-a-library-for-others was all but finished several months ago, I'll endeavour to get that out, though it still has the awkward limitation of doing rotations with Euler angles only — which may be less efficient and is certainly more limiting than special orthogonals or quaternions. I'm still thinking about smart ways to optimise the reverse face stuff. I need to get something hierarchical or otherwise group-related in there; checking every single face is obviously not the optimal way to proceed. I guess what I'm looking for is some sort of bin-type mapping to the surface of the unit sphere that allows all the points on a particular hemisphere to be isolated from the majority of the points on the opposite hemisphere. Or, you know, something at least a lot like a sphere. Though I'm not sure any sort of lookup into something a lot like a sphere would help much as it'd need to be indexed by a three-tuple. I guess a good broad sweep would be to mark each face according to the visibility of the faces of a bounding box — if a face on the real model points away from the face on the bounding box then it definitely can't be visible if the box face is. Or something like that. I'm going to stop thinking aloud now... On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Steve Parry-Thomasmorriga...@aol.com wrote: I guess when the clocks go back in October SAM users will hibernate over the winter until next August! From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Ian Spencer Sent: 04 August 2009 08:04 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hi - just checking Wow, I just sent the checking mail to see whether something was wrong with my subscription to the group and it seems it was like poking a stick into a hornets nest (in a positive sort of way) - over 40 mails in the last few days on the group. It's just great to see everyone is alive and kicking out there. Ian - Original Message - From: Ian Spencer To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 4:10 PM Subject: Hi - just checking Not heard anything on the group for quite a while so just thought I would send a 'test' to check it's not me that's got a problem and say hi to everyone. I know you've all taken your Sam's to the beach and so no activity on the group. Ian
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
Thanks for the encouragement guys, it really helps to read your comments! you havent managed to squeez a three player verison out of the sams screen have you the blocks are only attribute squares after all Funny you should ask this! Although I haven't actually tried it, 4 players would fit! I've made the blocks quite small, 6x6, and they are placed so the outlines overlap making them take up slightly less space again so 50 something pixels for each player. I always had it in the back of my mind that any more than 2 players would be done online, with 2 players on one Sam VS 2 on another, or all against all. This was mainly because of how cramped 3 or 4 pairs of hands would be on the keyboard. I think I've read that the Sam does support multiple joysticks but there's a bug in the hardware somewhere? I have no idea how feasible all that would be with the trinity, but I've thought a lot about the implementation in terms of gameplay. I think I've structured things right so it would be easy enough to create a 1-4 player game. pity no one put letters on teh blocks so that as a line or more is wiped off you get a kind of scabble letter game to play for a bonus - and a bit of a wrest from joystick wrangling I'm sure I've seen something like that but with numbers on the blocks, can't think where though. I guess a maths based game solves the problem of storing a dictionary! was hoping to develop pop and lemmings but need to sit down with the pic controller board first unless you could explain how to disassemble 128k spectrum software? I wouldn't know how to disassemble 16K spectrum software. If I did I'd make a mode 4 version of Sandy White's Ant Attack and never leave the house again :)
Re: ATT : Roger Jowett
Geoff Winkless wrote: Roger Jowett wrote: tasword+2 with tascon+d from format was much more my cup of tea im amazed no one has bothered to convert it for sam is it incredibly difficult to convert a 128k porgram I'm confused. I'm 99.9% sure I have Tasword for the Sam, no? http://www.worldofsam.org/node/298 Not sure if it's the 128K variant but it certainly had disc handling. D.
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
ant attack! classic havent seen it on the 81! pity no one used the fdd3000 second processor have you seen zx spin runing rzx files ony 7mhz processor is plenty nuf wouldnt an attribute square be easier and faster to program yeah joystick splitter i have one think velesoft has chunted a joystick port on the mouse interface though no analog joystick yet! di u see my sam vids yet? On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the encouragement guys, it really helps to read your comments! you havent managed to squeez a three player verison out of the sams screen have you the blocks are only attribute squares after all Funny you should ask this! Although I haven't actually tried it, 4 players would fit! I've made the blocks quite small, 6x6, and they are placed so the outlines overlap making them take up slightly less space again so 50 something pixels for each player. I always had it in the back of my mind that any more than 2 players would be done online, with 2 players on one Sam VS 2 on another, or all against all. This was mainly because of how cramped 3 or 4 pairs of hands would be on the keyboard. I think I've read that the Sam does support multiple joysticks but there's a bug in the hardware somewhere? I have no idea how feasible all that would be with the trinity, but I've thought a lot about the implementation in terms of gameplay. I think I've structured things right so it would be easy enough to create a 1-4 player game. pity no one put letters on teh blocks so that as a line or more is wiped off you get a kind of scabble letter game to play for a bonus - and a bit of a wrest from joystick wrangling I'm sure I've seen something like that but with numbers on the blocks, can't think where though. I guess a maths based game solves the problem of storing a dictionary! was hoping to develop pop and lemmings but need to sit down with the pic controller board first unless you could explain how to disassemble 128k spectrum software? I wouldn't know how to disassemble 16K spectrum software. If I did I'd make a mode 4 version of Sandy White's Ant Attack and never leave the house again :)
RE: SAM's 20th Birthday
Hi Roger, Yes, that's me I think. I never did any networking stuff with the DISCiPLE - just the multi-level tape loader to disk loader 'conversions'. I was interested in the networking stuff at one point to get two SAMs to each play half of an eight channel mod in time with one SAM acting as master and the other as slave. This could then be futher coolened by adding more SAMs allowing even more channel mods. Note that this never left the thinking stage. Another idea I had, when Nev's hard disc interface was rebuilt to the atom was to let the SAM MOD player preprocess the 8 channel (or more) mod output to hard disc and then play this back at 15.6KHz. Note that this never left the thinking stage. Another idea I had was to compress the samples of very large mods (larger than could fit in memory) since the 10.4KHz output never needed this resolution anyway and so be able to play them back. Regards, Stefan From: Roger Jowett [mailto:rogerjow...@gmail.com] Sent: Tue 2009-08-04 21:02 To: Stefan Drissen Subject: Re: SAM's 20th Birthday stefan drissen? not the stefan drissen? no way the stuff of legend u didnt figure out the network on the disciple? delta wing creative sparks was one of teh four only networked tt racer digital integration 8 player thru network how could we connect it to sam ? audio joystick? serial ?parallel couldnt have been that fast could it? mind you kouldnt have been as slow as pc yahoo/msn live messenger streamed video really cant say i would reccommend wasting £1k on a dual core 64 bit and a vga ati x1950 power colour pci e pro xtweeem - but thecomponent cable has an arrow pointing the wrong way! well worth £150! cant even sli it despite fake nvidia sli connectors driver crashes pc! dunnon anything about 128 conversions? On 04/08/2009, Stefan Drissen stefan.dris...@exactsoftware.com wrote: I had an internal and an external drive (because I had a speccy DISCiPLE disk interface) - both worked fine - as long as you did indeed not reset with a disk / disc in the drive. Edwin Blink's DPU (disk protector unit - http://www.samcoupe-pro-dos.co.uk/edwin/hardware/dpu/dpu.htm) worked a charm. But as with all things you are used to, it took a while before actually having the courage to leave the disk in the drive... :) Roger - is your keyboard missing the full stop and comma keys? -Original Message- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Roger Jowett Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 16:31 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: SAM's 20th Birthday lucky you didnt experience the external dirve interface the one supposedly compatible with the +d external drive different from the internal one which wiped the data you just saved off the disc if you left it in thte drive and pressed reset! anyone done any networking? 2009/8/2 Chris Pile chris.p...@blueyonder.co.uk: Hi folks... There was a thread a while ago mentioning the SAM's 20th birthday. When exactly is the 20th anniversary of the machine? Chris...
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
Spent so long reading about Ant Attack that I almost forgot what I was supposed to be doing, http://img269.imageshack.us/i/wubtrissnap.png/ the piece on the far left carries on falling through the floor in the next frame, so still a bug or 2 to iron out :) I do have a coding question but I will create a new thread with a suitable title to ask.
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
great virus website niceone! On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: Spent so long reading about Ant Attack that I almost forgot what I was supposed to be doing, http://img269.imageshack.us/i/wubtrissnap.png/ the piece on the far left carries on falling through the floor in the next frame, so still a bug or 2 to iron out :) I do have a coding question but I will create a new thread with a suitable title to ask.
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
Thanks Adrian :) @Roger, really? I thought imageshack was quite safe? *concerned*
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
dunno are you a gambling man? im owed 50kso im off the betting these days On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks Adrian :) @Roger, really? I thought imageshack was quite safe? *concerned*
RE: Hello to the Sam community!
imageshack isnt a virus website From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Roger Jowett Sent: 04 August 2009 22:16 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hello to the Sam community! great virus website niceone! On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: Spent so long reading about Ant Attack that I almost forgot what I was supposed to be doing, http://img269.imageshack.us/i/wubtrissnap.png/ the piece on the far left carries on falling through the floor in the next frame, so still a bug or 2 to iron out :) I do have a coding question but I will create a new thread with a suitable title to ask.
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
how many popups then? william hill heck does william hill ave to do witha tetris sam coop screen? i dont get the direct marketing strategic customer targetting etc etc On 04/08/2009, Adrian Brown adr...@apbcomputerservices.co.uk wrote: imageshack isnt a virus website From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Roger Jowett Sent: 04 August 2009 22:16 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hello to the Sam community! great virus website niceone! On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: Spent so long reading about Ant Attack that I almost forgot what I was supposed to be doing, http://img269.imageshack.us/i/wubtrissnap.png/ the piece on the far left carries on falling through the floor in the next frame, so still a bug or 2 to iron out :) I do have a coding question but I will create a new thread with a suitable title to ask.
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
heheh I guess I've trained myself to ignore them but I can see where you're coming from entirely :)
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
http://www.emagsoftware.it/spectrum/ ablo italiano prego rigatso or thers alwez... http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=enie=UTF-8sl=ittl=enu=http://www.emagsoftware.it/spectrum/ On 04/08/2009, Roger Jowett rogerjow...@gmail.com wrote: you havent managed to squeez a three player verison out of the sams screen have you the blocks are only attribute squares after all pity no one put letters on teh blocks so that as a line or more is wiped off you get a kind of scabble letter game to play for a bonus - and a bit of a wrest from joystick wrangling im amazed no one used the 32k sam rom and some algorithms to see just how many english words could be seeded from the rom source they fitted 700,000 on a sam disc for a spell checker for outwrite and secretary but no plurals pity it hasnt been moded for the atom lite bought towo from edwin and a comms interface get back to uk and find my keyboards have packed up! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRGnYWuOM5M was hoping to develop pop and lemmings but need to sit down with the pic controller board first unless you could explain how to disassemble 128k spectrum software? 2009/8/3 the_wub ! the...@gmail.com: Hi all, I'm a new member to the mailing list and since there's been some activity over the last few days I thought now was a good time to stop lurking and say, hey! to everyone. My name is Rob, I'm 32 and live in the south of England. I'm currently working as a panel wirer/wire man for a sub-contracting electrical firm. I was a speccy user back in the day and desperately wanted the Sam when it came out. Long story short, it was too expensive and I ended up with a second hand Sega Master system instead. I still have a Sam scrapbook I put together from magazine cuttings in the loft somewhere, and I could (but won't) tell you about a highly embarrassing letter I wrote to Bruce Gorden when I was twelve that, to this day, I still cringe thinking about :) Last year I won a nice boxed Sam Coupe on ebay with one floppy drive and a pile of disks and I can honestly say that life's much better now. I have lots to say about what I missed out on by not having the Sam in '89-'90 but I'll save all that. The important thing is that I've been learning to program z80 since it arrived and am just finishing my first, actually playable, game! I'm sorry that it's tetris but as a consolation prize it's a two player tetris on one Sam, loosely based on the vs mode from the old Gameboy tetris. I hope that's enough for an introduction. I feel a bit like I'm turning up to a party 20 years late with only a bottle of Blue Nun to show for myself, but I'm looking forward to finally getting involved in the community and catching up on all those lost years!
Re: Hello to the Sam community!
wat lester awregina mouse keeps wandering off the window nvidia nview desktop manager - bit of an oxy moron there seeing as the machine is stalled with wincoder winproducer so badly hung i cant even task manager the git On 04/08/2009, the_wub ! the...@gmail.com wrote: heheh I guess I've trained myself to ignore them but I can see where you're coming from entirely :)
RE: sam birthday projects
I had an idea a while back to release it as an Incan themed game - kind of like Prey, but set in an Incan pyramid on the North Pole that was revealed via global warming. Filled with... Statues of Ice :) -- Simon Cooke Director of Engineering / Business Developer, X-RAY KID STUDIOS - www.x-raykid.com http://www.x-raykid.com/ Founder, Popcorn Films - www.popcornfilms.com http://www.popcornfilms.com/ Cell: 206 250 7892 XBOX Live GamerTag: Spec Tec From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Stefan Drissen Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 12:01 AM To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: RE: sam birthday projects Cue Entropy - clouds of vapour anyone? ;-) _ Van: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no namens Andrew Collier Verzonden: ma 2009-08-03 23:40 Aan: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Onderwerp: Re: Hi - just checking On 31 Jul 2009, at 18:46, LCD wrote: maybe everyone is busy with their next SAM Mega hit game? ;-). Actually, it's funny you should mention that Andrew -- http://www.intensity.org.uk/ attachment: winmail.dat
RE: Hi - just checking
You only really need quaternions if you're doing animation or interpolation. If you can live with the gimble lock, euler's fine. -Original Message- From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Thomas Harte Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 10:05 AM To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hi - just checking Am I replying to the correct thread? I don't know. But I've had the opposite experience to a bunch of people here, having become substantially more busy in my work than I was even just a few months ago, squeezing the SAM temporarily out. A version of my vector 3d-stuff-as-a-library-for-others was all but finished several months ago, I'll endeavour to get that out, though it still has the awkward limitation of doing rotations with Euler angles only - which may be less efficient and is certainly more limiting than special orthogonals or quaternions. I'm still thinking about smart ways to optimise the reverse face stuff. I need to get something hierarchical or otherwise group-related in there; checking every single face is obviously not the optimal way to proceed. I guess what I'm looking for is some sort of bin-type mapping to the surface of the unit sphere that allows all the points on a particular hemisphere to be isolated from the majority of the points on the opposite hemisphere. Or, you know, something at least a lot like a sphere. Though I'm not sure any sort of lookup into something a lot like a sphere would help much as it'd need to be indexed by a three-tuple. I guess a good broad sweep would be to mark each face according to the visibility of the faces of a bounding box - if a face on the real model points away from the face on the bounding box then it definitely can't be visible if the box face is. Or something like that. I'm going to stop thinking aloud now... On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Steve Parry-Thomasmorriga...@aol.com wrote: I guess when the clocks go back in October SAM users will hibernate over the winter until next August! From: owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no [mailto:owner-sam-us...@nvg.ntnu.no] On Behalf Of Ian Spencer Sent: 04 August 2009 08:04 To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: Re: Hi - just checking Wow, I just sent the checking mail to see whether something was wrong with my subscription to the group and it seems it was like poking a stick into a hornets nest (in a positive sort of way) - over 40 mails in the last few days on the group. It's just great to see everyone is alive and kicking out there. Ian - Original Message - From: Ian Spencer To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 4:10 PM Subject: Hi - just checking Not heard anything on the group for quite a while so just thought I would send a 'test' to check it's not me that's got a problem and say hi to everyone. I know you've all taken your Sam's to the beach and so no activity on the group. Ian
