3Dconnexion/Blender Beta Feedback

[ngomes]

Now I see... You're right, Tehrasha.

First time I lay my eyes on that thing. Wonder what others, also lurking in this Forum, have to say. (Cof,jwick,cof,cof).

[jwick]

Wow. I guess we left something behind. We were in fact in the Atari buildings working on the Jaguar SDK (on the very day of OJ's slow speed chase -- I flew between LAX/John Wayne and SJC that day). It was the final days of Atari. The place was deserted. No one was around except Aaron O and me. We had the run of the place. We neglected to realize that Aaron was under 25 and couldn't rent a car -- LOL. I forget where he stayed, or how he ate.

This looks like a rapid prototype model that we made a few of for testing the feel and button layout. This was made of a very heavy plastic resin type material (probably from a rubber mold). We may have hollowed out some of them and put a ciruitboard in. It would go on to become the Spaceball Avenger.

It's maybe worth $10, but I wouldn't even pay that. Makes a nice boat anchor.

[ngomes]

Btw, pretty cool web site you have going, Tehrasha. It is quite something to see all together. Very nice.

Brings back all sort of memories.

Keep it up!

[Tehrasha]

This is great! Love hearing back-story on the history of these devices.

Now that we have completely derailed this thread, I think I better start a new one for antique hardware, and return this to talk of Blender Compatibility...

http://spacemice.wikidot.com/blender

[Tehrasha]

For a long time, we had been wanting free-flying ndof capability in Blender, and in recent releases we had finally got it.... sort of.
We could finially translate and rotate at the same time. However, the center of rotation remained globally centered.

If the user selected an object, and fit it to screen, rotation worked perfectly. However, if they then panned the object in any direction, the object would move appropriately, but the center of rotation remained fixed in the center of the screen. So now, rotational movement resulted in the object orbiting around an imaginary point in space. It was possible to free-fly in this way, but it was not intuitive, and was accurately described as being akin to drunk driving.

So in the latest release, we get an added feature in the Interface preferences 'rotate/zoom around selection' which does exactly what it says.
If you pan a selected object off to the side, that object remains the center of rotation. However, this comes at the price of losing 'free-fly' capability.
The default has returned to rotation/zoom control, with panning requiring the use of a modifier key (SHIFT).

Development of the ndof code in Blender has stalled. The ground work is laid, we just need someone with experience/skill to refine the final touches.

http://spacemice.wikidot.com/blender