Author: Dylan Stout

13 Jan

This weekend I got a really cool opportunity to go to Galaxy's Edge in Disneyland to preview the new Star Wars ride Rise of the Resistance. As a self-proclaimed theme park aficionado and also huge Star Wars fan I can say with some assurance that my experience on Rise of the Resistance is the best I have ever had on any amusement park ride. I am not sure if I would even call it a "ride" in the traditional sense, since for some portions of the attraction you are being directed from location to location by either Resistance cast members or First...

01:28 / Opinion / Personal
31 Dec

Development on Project Stardust, a Virtual Reality X-Wing simulator, has been ramping up for the past month. It is planned out and ready to be a big part of my last four months of University. If you haven't heard of this project you can read about it here. Current version as of this post is 0.71b and there is a lot to add in order to get to version 1.0. Here are my current goals for a "complete" experience, broken down into core and secondary: Core Additions   HOTAS support Ever since I published the first prototype I have been getting messages about adding HOTAS...

05:53 / Games / Project Stardust / Software Development
26 Dec

Today I am going to walk you through a bug I encountered while creating my most recent project Project Stardust. If a camera in Unity moves too far away from the origin of the play space, things start to break down mathematically. Visual artifacts become very apparent, most often seen in the form of vibrating or flickering meshes/textures. The Cause: Floating point rounding error Since the Transform's  x, y, and z coordinates are of C# float data type there are limitations to ranges in which rounding errors do not occur. For a full write-up of why this happens you must understand the IEEE standard for floating...

00:38 / Coding / Games / Software Development
13 Dec

For those of you who aren't familiar with this VR project or the purpose check out this post. It is an X-Wing Virtual Reality experience created by Dylan Stout, a VR researcher and software developer. You can DOWNLOAD Project Stardust 0.71b HERE Project Stardust - 0.71b.zip SHA256: 06360D25C50ACAE08D5D2CD5744E1DC0CC0D37EE1EABD443AE06E1317ECB2FD0 File Size : 870MB [891,439 kb / 912,832,798 bytes] How do I verify the integrity of a file?  Having troubles with the download?  In the event the above link does not work for you, try this one. If neither of them work contact me on twitter. Is this program safe? I highly recommend running your own anti-virus scans on the entire contents of your...

19:41 / Games / Project Stardust / Software Development
25 Aug

I had the privilege of working with Microsoft as a Software Engineer Intern @ Redmond, WA this last summer and during my time there I treasured my access to all of the CHEAP wonderful food on campus. There were cafes in between almost every group of buildings that Microsoft owns in Redmond (they own basically half of the city) and each one had different and delicious selections of food. I'll show you some of what I ate and rate it's taste out of 5 (1 being shit & 5 being delicious). Forewarning: I eat a lot...

18:04 / Lifestyle / Opinion / Personal
24 Aug

My Fall semester 2018 at the University of Utah was spent developing a VR experience for a Virtual Reality Sickness (VRS) study which turned into my first ever solo developed video game. Project Stardust is a rudimentary study of the correlation between the number of reference points in a virtual environment and VRS symptoms. This project was completed by a two man team and while I handled the entirety of the development work, the research & design portion of this project was a partnered effort mostly driven by Daxton Wilson. For those of you who want the TLDR, you can download the latest...

20:52 / Career / Coding / Games / Programming / Technology
02 May

When you search the internet for how to become a programmer or learn to code you will undoubtedly be met with never-ending advertisements seeking to sell you the easiest or quickest path. I can tell you up front that I will never sell you anything and I won't even place advertisements on this site. As a software developer with several years experience I only want to introduce people to what it's actually going to take in order to become a software developer. While it is isn't easy to write software, it certainly isn't terribly difficult either and anyone can learn with enough...

22:56 / Career / Coding / Programming / Software Development
02 Jan

I was recently tasked with creating some fairly unique data visualizations with D3.js for some big name companies, displaying aggregate data sets in visual pleasing and easily discernible graphics. I figured it would be good to document my experience so others can also learn what D3 is all about. What is D3? The D3.js library is a powerful javascript library for integrating data into interactive documents. The documents could be hosted by a web service to allow data display and visualization on large scales. The full source and tests are also available for download on GitHub. D3 allows data to be bound to the DOM (Document Object Model)...

22:16 / Coding / Programming / Technology / Web Service
01 Sep

The 70's was a pivotal time when it was untenable for the U.S. government to keep its' iron grip on the computing power necessary to make & break a resilient cipher. What followed was the first public encryption standard DES (Data Encryption Standard) published by computing monolith IBM; giving the masses a way to have their information secret from prying eyes...

19:22 / Opinion / Personal / Technology