[gameprogrammer] Re: Tachometer / Analog Gauges

What are you viewing the information through? (custom display hardware / HUD / Laptop with windows)
What OS is the hardware running (if any?)
What graphics API's are available for your system (if any?) There is no point someone giving you code if this project is running on custom hardware or a PC with DOS and you need some assembler

If you are new to graphics then for a simple 2D display I recommend Allegro or OpenGL(and GLUT) with C.
Both can run on multiple platforms, should be fast enough for you, and wont require much to get started

How do you get the information into the system? (serial line? usb? telepathy?)
I suspect that will be what determines the speed that the display updates..

simply dump it into a comma delimited file every 1/4 second. 
eww..
what happens when one program is writting to this file, and the "display" 
program is reading from it?
or do you just want to view what happened, after the fact. Im not sure how 
useful that is for engine tuning.
Why not feed the data directly into a program.. then both write it to the file 
(if you must) and then keep the rest in memory for use with 
visualisation/display code.
You will want a test harness that can feed data in at different rates over the 
connection to plan to get the raw data from.

Then if you chose to log, you might want to simply log a summary every second.
If you want to write logs to the disk in the same code as the visualisation, 
you should use buffered IO and if your system supports it, have a separate 
task/thread and msg queue setup to send off stuff for logging.. giving your 
display task a higher priority.

-Josh


toddjasp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hey guys,

    I'm actually not REALLY writing a game, but instead I'm developing a car 
diagnostic monitoring system. I'm writing software that will allow you to 
interface with the car's ECM, and read the information real-time. It actually 
sounds a lot more fascinating than it is... there's nothig that hasn't already 
been done a million times. However, one thing that I am doing that isn't done 
that frequently is that I'll be incorporating a logging feature.

Basically, all that I'll be doing differently is that I'll take all the car's 
sensor values (tach, voltage, O2 sensor, fuel mixture, etc...) and I'll simply 
dump it into a comma delimited file every 1/4 second.

For those of you who are car guys, this will basically give you the ability to 
have a road-capable Dyno... (helps you diagnose problems with your car and 
determine whether or not the car is running lean or rich at specific RPMs).


Anyway, that said... I do intend to create the program's GUI so that it 
also acts as a real-time monitoring system... so what I'd like to be able to do 
is have a graphical (analog) tachometer.

I'm already on this list, so I figured I would ask here.... in case anyone is 
developing a racing game, I figured maybe someone has done this before and 
could give me some pointers. I'd prefer to not use a 3rd party component and 
instead write it myself. It would have to be capable of updating every 1/4 
second.

I can program in Delphi, VB, and some Visual C++, so if you have example code 
in any of those languages, I'd like to see it!


Thanks!!!

Todd




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