HI, having bought a new HP Pavilion DV5 laptop with support for CUDA (by means of a 9600M GT graphics card 512MB GDDR2 memory), there is a good chance that I feel like resuming work on Tileproxy. The GPU is fast enough to handle most recent games, including FSX (not with details maxed of course) I would likely want to explore using the graphics chip for post-processing and compressing textures as well as creating realistically lit city textures for night flying. The major drawback might be that there may be a dependency on CUDA (nVidia GPUs). If possible, I will try to keep this optional, meaning that without nVidia chip you'll see the CPU doing some of this work where feasible.I am also still interested in doing a simulation of a coin pusher arcade machine. This requires performing physics computation on the GPU because the CPU can't handle it (I've tried!)I have a 40 hour/week day job - so everything will have to proceed in spare time.Cheers,Christian

Is using the compute shader from DirectX11 also an option? That way it works on both NVidia and ATI cards. Drawback would be that the cards themselves need to be DX11 capable. DX11 will be available on both Vista and Win7. Win7 can be used for free at the moment with a release candidate which is pretty much like the finished product already :)

Is using the compute shader from DirectX11 also an option? That way it works on both NVidia and ATI cards. Drawback would be that the cards themselves need to be DX11 capable. DX11 will be available on both Vista and Win7. Win7 can be used for free at the moment with a release candidate which is pretty much like the finished product already :)

DirectX 11 and DirectX 11 graphics drivers are too far out in the future in my opinion.Using OpenCL would be an alternative, but it requires more work from the programmer compared the CUDA runtime API.I've already spent time learning CUDA, but DX11 or OpenCL require a fresh start.

I am also still interested in doing a simulation of a coin pusher arcade machine. This requires performing physics computation on the GPU because the CPU can't handle it (I've tried!)

OK, after lot of tinkering the CPU can handle some 300-400 coins in a virtual arcade machine. Here's a graphically unspectacular prototype showing the physics working. It's running on my new laptophttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bLAq7btZbU&fmt=22

Nice work :( Only problem I can see is that the coins vibrate, which makes them move when they should stay still, but you seem to have matched the weight and behavior of the coins well.

Nice work :( Only problem I can see is that the coins vibrate, which makes them move when they should stay still, but you seem to have matched the weight and behavior of the coins well.

You didn't notice that this was at 1/10th of Earth's gravity, did you ;-) Everything falls in slow motion. This was necessary because otherwise the coins would have jiggled much worse.Christian

Installed FSX and Acceleration on the machine. Also installed the SDKs (software development kits) for FSX. And I ordered an Orbx Australia DVD (all 4 regions) - I would like to see if this is better than taking the Tileproxy approach. I've heard so much praise about the quality of the Orbx products.I have a couple of ideas for a TNG (Tileproxy next generation) that would work without a filesystem driver which was the root cause of much trouble in Tileproxy.

Looking forward to it Christian.What are the benefits of running without the file system driver? What problems was it causing? IAN

You didn't notice that this was at 1/10th of Earth's gravity, did you ;-) Everything falls in slow motion. This was necessary because otherwise the coins would have jiggled much worse.Christian

I see now, but didn't realize that before. Doesn't seem to effect the movement much, but I see the coins being dropped move slower. Maybe the friction should be higher, to make them slide less when on top of each other.