Lots of cool info about aurora solar storms, etc... Would be good to integrated into some of the supporting screens.

Noaa Space Weather

One of the challenging things has been to find a way to light up lights and respond to buttons that located around the ship. This looks like a possible way to simplify the output. Certainly a MIDI file could do some cool animated lights and servos. Unfortunately it only supports MIDI output, (and THRU) so it cannot be used to gather input.

MIDI Decoder

I found a set of Open Source components that support MIDI for Delphi which can be found here.

Included with the Open GL package for Delphi GLScene are various extras such as the ODE package as well as the BASS sound library. Recently I took a closer look at the library to see what it can do. I have to say that it is pretty amazing.

The library is a relative small single (100K) DLL with header or unit files for various languages including VB, C, and Delphi. There also extension libraries that allow for specific encoding and special effects. It support playing streaming radio (Shoutcast) in the background as well as many audio files both wave based and music files such as MIDI and MOD music files. Check out the site link above for more details.

There are a number of sample programs, and the one showing how to play a Shoutcast feed was most interesting. My goal was to create an HTTP plugin that would be able to play that stations on the main simulation server box, (so that the music would come out of the main speakers), but allow control from one of the remote machines. Remarkably it worked on the first try, a rare occurance in web server modules, usually due to executing in a separate thread.

This mostly just to create some links to interesting sites worthy of more investigation:

JSB Open Source Flight Dynamics Modeler

JSBSim is an open source flight dynamics model (FDM) that compiles and runs under many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, Cygwin (Unix on Windows), etc. The FDM is essentially the physics/math model that defines the movement of an aircraft, rocket, etc., under the forces and moments applied to it using the various control mechanisms and from the forces of nature.

Open Extensible Architecture for the Analysis and Generation of Linked Simulations

As one can find in examining the architecture of the spaceroom there are a number of application components as well as a component based system in designing the applications that handle the modeling side of things in the system. The current modeling is primarily focused on the physical systems of the ship itself, modeling such things as power generation and consumption by devices as well as the motive force generation of the engine system and shields. The physics modeling of the system is managed by the ODE library. Eventually the sound system using Direct3D will allow for realistic sound management as well. Realistic display is still a while off but could also be managed by libraries such as OpenGL. A piece that was missing was a component that could be used to evaluate the state of the system and based on rules invoke actions. This is a complicated process that requires the ability to define many rules that can be evaluated in parallel.