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From: phib412@ut-emx.UUCP (Thomas Russo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Flight/dog questions
Keywords: Airshow missle lock heads up versions etc...
Message-ID: <10878@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 2 Mar 89 15:26:32 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
Lines: 50

We've got a couple of Personal Irises and I've got a few dog/flight
questions.

1) I've heard talk of an "airshow" capability. How does one create an
airshow and how does one view such a thing?

2) The heads-up display is great, but how do you get the missle lock to
work when you're using it? I've tried it many many times and can't figure
out where the target should be for the lock to function.

3) about that heads up display... there is a little circle with part of a
cross hair which moves about as I zip around. My first guess at what this was
(a sight?) appears to be incorrect. So what the **** is it?

4) On one of our irises (the one with the chintzier graphics) the radar shows
an opponent in red if the target is above you, and black if it's below. This is
fine when using the heads-up display, but if you use the other type the little
black radar blip doesn't show up so well on the black background. Any way to 
tweak the executable (we don't have the source) to fix that? (BTW, I was told
that the source is available if you sign a non-disclosure agreement. Is
that so?)

What follows is not really a question, but I thought I'd register my thoughts
on this matter. It's really just a wish:

5) Isn't there a better way of doing inter-machine dogfighting than using
UDP broadcasts? (like, broadcast once when starting up so other running
programs can see you, then maintaining a list of addresses with which to
communicate) Our network has hundreds of hosts on it, and UDP broadcasts
at dog's rate bring the thing to a grinding halt. (Many of the older hosts
respond to every packet with a "port unknown" packet. Meltdown city.)
So, like, the only way to run dog is to disconnect from the campus net, 
which means that we can't dogfight with the other irises on campus, which
is a shame. I know dog is an unsupported demo, but if anyone has the time
to spend hacking it up to use some other mechanism it would probably be a
good thing to do.

But don't get me wrong: we love dog. Deep down, it is one of the secret reasons
I encouraged the purchase of Irises at the center!
--tvr
------
Thomas Russo
Center for Nonlinear Dynamics
University of Texas at Austin
russo@chaos.utexas.edu but not before friday, when our disk is back up.

(there's another question: Anyone have any bad experiences with those
1.2GB disks which come on 4Server8s? Ours barfed badly this week and had to
be replaced, after only 1 month in service. Is this a trend, or did we just 
have really really really bad luck?)