I gotta say I'm quite jealous of your dark skies and beautiful photography.
Also, how are you overcoming flexure and mirror flop with your setup!? I have troubles keeping a 6" stable for a minute with a reasonable mount. Do you have more info on your setup anywhere?
I agree, each topic in the game engine architecture book could be another book on its own. However, it does give a good introduction and briefly touches on most of the topics in this diagram https://i.imgur.com/SxydAoF.png
That book is great, but it’s discussion of graphical techniques is shallow (by design, it’s an overview book). Real-time Rendering was the book given to me back when I was first learning game development:
I'd prefer dual 1/4 threads on the bottom of the camera, then you could add the Arca Swiss dovetail and it wouldn't have the rotation issues. Also, the aesthetics and feel of the camera body wouldn't change.
Relevant section:
"Provided the reduced object lists, our next step is to construct all possible
triangles. From the list of n objects we can construct n(n − 1)(n − 2)/6
triangles. Those will be represented in so called "triangle space".
We need to choose a triangle representation that will let us find similar triangles,
that is to find corresponding object triplets being insensitive to translation,
rotation, scaling and flipping. A triangle in the triangle space
could be represented as a two-dimensional point (x, y) where
x = a/b, y = b/c.
a, b and c are the lengths of triangle sides in decreasing order. Similar triangles
will be located close to each other in the triangle space."
I'd love to know what the current advantages are over running asm.js? I understand that it will definitely be faster eventually, but if I have a project that uses asm.js today, would it make sense to run it with WebAssembly instead? (ignoring the fact that not all browsers support it)
One potential issue:
"If you have lots of back-and-forth between WebAssembly and JS (as you do with smaller tasks), then this overhead is noticeable."
As far as I'm aware, asm.js code does not have an issue with this, as it is just js code. Is this correct?
(edit: I should have mentioned that I'm primarily interested from an electron.js point of view at the moment, where Firefox asm.js optimizations are unavailable)
asm.js code is "just" JS code in the sense that it is a subset of JS: a non-asm.js-aware JS implementation can treat it the same way as normal JS, and it will execute correctly. But in implementations where it's fast, asm.js is usually handled separately.
Re your last question: when I wrote http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings I found that "each call into an asm.js function takes about 2 msec (at this writing)" (on Firefox). That was back in the week of asm.js's release, and I'd bet the situation's better now. But it was the same kind of issue.
Emscripten should produce an asm.js fallback if wasm support is missing. The biggest wins in the short term will be smaller code size, and faster first startup time.
This reminds me a little bit of the IDA disassembler. There are moments where you might face production issues with external JS code and have no source maps available. A tree view to dissect what is going on would be useful in these situations.
These cars will likely have many sensors of different types at overlapping locations, its not likely to keep going if all are completely unusable.
But I wonder about the snow though. How does the car know where to go when there are no identifying lane features? Maybe its not as hard of a problem as I believe it to be?
How does a human do it? It's extremely hard but recognizing landmarks like a guard rail or plow markers would be possible. Or maybe self driving cars will apply a sane approach and stay off the streets in bad weather unlike human piloted vehicles. (There is a whole other rant about letting employees work from on bad snow days)
I really don't get these questions. "How will the car drive in whiteout conditions where the road is frozen over and not at all visible?" Same way a (smart) human drives: it will pull over.
For substantially less crazy conditions, you can infer where the lanes would be by (a) looking at the spots of the road you can see, (b) prior knowledge of the road from experience, and (c) looking at oncoming cars and the flow of traffic, and driving in a way that doesn't surprise them. Though it's likely the case that you shouldn't be driving in these conditions anyway.
You must not live somewhere that gets a lot of snow :) For those of us that do, sometimes driving conditions are much less than ideal, even unsafe. Several times per winter I have to drive home from work on unplowed roads. As you put it, I have prior knowledge of the road (maybe precise GPS will help here?), and I can figure out where it is safe to drive based on tire tracks. I guess these will just be places that you probably won't have one of these vehicles (just as you wouldn't ride your motorcycle in such weather).
> Same way a (smart) human drives: it will pull over.
You mean carefully get to the nearest settlement as soon as possible? Some of these storms can last for days at a time. Stopping to wait it out in the middle of nowhere, especially if you don't have a full tank of fuel to keep the car warm for extended periods, is a pretty scary situation.
Hmmm. If the car decided, before your trip started, that it's too dangerous for anyone to drive where you want to go because of possible weather and environmental conditions mid-route, would that be useful or enraging?
I imagine a bit of both. Getting caught in a snow storm is a pretty horrible experience, and I would gladly stay home knowing I would have otherwise ended up in one. But at the same time the forecasting isn't all that great, so often the storms don't amount to anything, and you would have been perfectly fine to be out there. Sometimes the storms even come up without any warning (most of the snow we get – especially that which causes driving issues – is from the lake, not the clouds). Having to essentially hibernate in the winter because the car is always erring on the side of caution could become pretty enraging.
As haywire said, if you live where it snows, you drive regardless of whether or not you can see the road. I got a job to do, computers don't fix themselves, and my job is necessary even if the weather sucks outside.
While I think it's plausible to teach a self-driving car to drive in snow (like I do, generally following in the tracks of the cars ahead of me), I honestly think this is one of the best justifications that cars should continue to have steering wheels and pedals: Because automated snow driving is going to take a lot longer to become a solved problem than fair weather driving.
Also, how are you overcoming flexure and mirror flop with your setup!? I have troubles keeping a 6" stable for a minute with a reasonable mount. Do you have more info on your setup anywhere?