Author: apaloczi

I work as a software programmer and my hobby is robotics.

FreespaceOpen installer improvement or how to mavenize an old ant based project

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The Pre-story

A month ago I was having a big nostalgia moment, installed the GOG client and started to playing with old games. My childhood was there again. I remember these games very fondly even today, although I have played with them long ago. They managed to bewitch me with their charm and whenever I played I entered another world where I was the hero who had to solve the problems. It was really fantastic that even with the pixel graphics they had their magic.

I wanted to play with Freespace 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSpace_2

I recall the day when my schoolmate introduced it to me during my elementary school years. It was fun to play the pilot who shoots down the evil shivans, meanwhile colossal ships clashing each other and you try to avoid their beam turrets laser. In my first encounter with the game I had rushed in the middle of the fight and ended up wildly spinning my ship by a shot of the beam turrets.
My nostalgia energy was definitely fully charged and ready to take the adventure, the helmet and the ship controls to show again who is the better pilot. I have clicked the start and right away the energy flew away because the window was halfy showing the game. Great, so I did some search and one of the best solution on steam was to use FS2Open version. Which pumps up the game to be ready to be used on a modern day computer without issues.

NOTE: It is also worst to mention that the creators of the Freespace game released the source code on the web when their company was bought to be freely used. Since that happened a lot of promising space simulator projects have been created based on the source code. More info here.

I went to Hard-Light wiki and downloaded their installer client which was a jar file. Hmm I program mostly in java I know about these things and I’m curious how the code looks like, it is always good to see how things are done by others to learn a few new tricks. The installer project source code is not hard to find, it is located on github. I checked the project and it was created long time ago. Fortunately the project is still active and I believe it is quite useful one. For that reason I created a Hungarian translation for it. Then I have converted it to maven based project for fun.

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ROS and sounds or how to make your droid to say the Dalek Exterminate!!!

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Audio feedback from your robot

Intro

After our previous post where Bence explained that roboticists should be careful doing scary stuff with their robot, I thought I need to do some with mine to troll ourselves. So why shouldn’t my robot sound like this when it is moving:

 

 

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