Displaying video games with lasers

[Murudai]

Well, LSX has arrived. The Ether Dream has arrived and the projector is arriving soon.

So some questions with LSX. Can I install it on multiple computers? I was thinking of having it on my desktop in order to create laser shows and test things, then use my laptop to actually run the shows.

And secondly, how on earth do I use it? lol. I mean, I installed the software and I clicked the 'RealTime' application. It comes up with an 'About LSX' screen with copyright and license info, including my serial code. If I try to enter anything into 'User name' the program freezes immediately and crashes. If I just press 'Okay' without entering any user name stuff it just closes and does nothing. PicEdit opens up okay though.

[dzodzo]

hm did you buy it with Riya card or USB dongle? Because the license should be bound to either Riya DAC or USB dongle, so it doesn't matter on how many computers you use it as long as you plug in this hardware you should have the program licensed

[colouredmirrorball]

Yes, you can install LSX on multiple computers, but you need to plug in a dongle so you can't run it at the same time on both computers.

Sounds like you need to activate your license though. Send drlava an email with your activation code. He will send you back an activation.lic file which you need to put in the program folder. I don't really get why this is useful since you already have a dongle, but oh well...
You can use the same file on multiple computers though.

[Murudai]

Okay. Email sent off then.

The projector has just arrived! Sadly though my DAC is lacking a power supply, and I'm still locked out of the software. The case looks pretty though

[Murudai]

What email address am I supposed to use? How can I contact this guy? I've been waiting for a several days now, on something that should be pretty trivial to do, and still no response. Which is frustrating since I'm really keen to get cracking on this thing!

And yeah, as you mentioned colouredmirrorball I don't understand this step. I already have the dongle, why does it need to be manually activated? This DRM system is not friendly to the users one bit, especially with that dongle. I've never seen anything like that before.

[Murudai]

Alriiiight. Finally got LSX working. Looks great! Although for a 60kpps scanner, it sure has a lot of flicker, even with beam shows with just a few squares, circles and lines. I'm guessing I might have to play around with the optimization settings? Are there any guides or tutorials out there for optimizing this thing? I'm (nearly) a total beginner at running a laser scanner and I've gone and acquired some pretty intense software and hardware, so the learning curve is pretty steep, lol.

Back to games though, are there any open source programs out there that programmatically control the Ether Dream DAC? Would be a good start, rather than trying to work it all out from scratch. I am looking at the Laser Asteroids game made in Python, but since I don't know Python it's a bit tricky. If there is an open source bit of software that uses C, C++ or even better C# then that would be more useful. Thanks.

[colouredmirrorball]

I'm afraid not, the etherdream is a pretty new project... AFAIK there are some sample files on the ether dream website or somewhere but it's very basic.

In LSX, make sure you set the scan speed to 30 or 60 K. There is a Scanner optimization button somewhere in the toolbar (or under Scanner >> Scanner setting >> Edit global parameters... and then choose scanning optimization). You can still increase the scan speed over 30 but not with the slider.
If you still experience flicker or the image gets too distorted, reduce the size (best done under DAC settings).

There's a reason behind the security being locked to both a dongle and a license file. Something with when there's a major security upgrade, you can just receive a new license file instead of needing to buy a new dongle. Or something. Not really sure what it was...

[Murudai]

Right, just a little update. I've built all the basics of my game engine now, so I've got it nicely drawing things in realtime in my program.

So some more info on the engine. It's C#, although it would be very easy to port since all it does is data crunching. It's designed to be used in a game with a regular drawing update loop (or any application like that). From a programmatic side, you draw laser graphics in exactly the same way you would draw normal graphics on a monitor. That way it's very easy to add laser functionality into an existing game.

The focus is on smoothness. No flickering allowed! You get a maximum amount of points you can draw each draw loop. The faster your projector scanners, the more points you can draw. The faster the FPS (frames per second), the less points you can draw. So a 30kpps scanner running at 60fps could do 500 points a frame, a 60kpps scanner running at 30fps could do 2000 points a frame. There is also features where the engine will automatically interpolate the points and do blanking. These variables will be adjustable in realtime, so you could increase or decrease the points drawn between frames, to adjust performance. A feature I just added allows you to script the colors of a line or shape, so you can easily add dynamic gradients or dotted lines (and much more) to anything. I'll need to show an example of how that works! The engine supports any number of laser projectors, and will have very simple options to adjust what projectors displays what. Currently the only supported DAC is the Ether Dream, but I'll eventually change to drlava's DAC library thing, so any DAC that that library supports will work. Or something like that, it's pretty easy to add support for other DACs, I just can't really do it myself since I only own the one DAC!

One major thing I'm planning to add is a separate graphical interface around the engine, using C# and XNA. The interface is not part of the engine, but is a separate thing that will add a GUI to allow adjustment to the values in the engine while the game is running. Anyone could make their own custom interface, although I'm hoping mine will be good enough for everyone So for examples of features, a nice graphical thing for doing geometric correction (individually for each projector). Tweaking blanking values, interpolation values, and monitoring performance of each scanner. It will also have a preview window, so you can see the graphics the scanner is outputting on your monitor.

... well, that's some of the stuff I'll be doing anyway And yes, I will be making this publicly open source eventually. Once the initial version is fully completed it'll be made available on like, github or something. Note that this engine will not support lasershows, there is more than enough software out there that does that already. This engine is specifically for interactive, realtime applications that need laser projector output.


Oh, and as a side note, I did a power test on my Kvant. This 2 watt unit is putting out over 2.5 watts

[Ferrous256]

I'm interested in this game engine you have been working on. I realize this thread is 4 years old, but in the off chance you see this, could I check out your github repo? I'm dying of curiosity.

[echelon]

I'm interested in this game engine you have been working on. I realize this thread is 4 years old, but in the off chance you see this, could I check out your github repo? I'm dying of curiosity.

Oh wow, this is such an old post! Email notifications are a thing, apparently.

I developed 3 laser projector games in Python between 2012-2013. One of them requires two projectors to play.

• Asteroids:
  
  • https://github.com/echelon/laser-asteroids
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi...ature=youtu.be
  
  
• Pong:
  
  • https://github.com/echelon/laser-pong
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs
  
  
• Untitled game thing I worked on with a friend:
  
  • https://github.com/lightengine/gamejam-demo
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0u6rtoW6d8&t=14s

None of these are particularly good. They were thrown together quickly for game jams when I was an undergrad.

After not touching laser projectors for nearly three years, I randomly decided to attend my first SELEM this past summer. I met a bunch of awesome people and renewed my interest in this subject. I bought a third projector from Adam, and hope to get to developing a new engine soon, though I've been somewhat preoccupied with other engineering projects.

Right now I'm finishing up a Donald Trump text to speech server: http://jungle.horse . I was going to add Hillary samples too, but it took waay to much time to get to even the point I'm at now. I'm going to end the project formally on election day.

Anyway, once my text to speech engine is done I'm going to get back to writing laser stuff. I might make it the focus of this month's Github game jam.

Everything laser-related I write from this point forward will be in Rust as it's a really great systems programming language. I've already published 3 laser-related crates on my github and crates.io: an EtherDream client (not done), an ILDA laser display file parser (somewhat working), and an EtherDream emulator that renders what shows look like when sent to EtherDream (more or less done and fully working).

Rust projects:

• https://github.com/echelon/ilda.rs
• https://github.com/echelon/etherdream.rs
• https://github.com/echelon/etherdream-emulator

I'm going to be 100% focusing on the EtherDream DAC since it's open source, but in theory the code will be adaptable to any DAC once more of it is in place.