Thunder Bay, satellite dishes, and GUIs

I went to Thunder Bay with my dad recently, and lucky for me most of his friends have a lot of ham radio hardware. Here's two of many photos I took of Ed's satellite dish! Although I have enough Mars models for now, this is a great technical reference for later:

This dish is just right for Mars. It is very functional, yet still cobbled together.

O rly..? Some hobbyists bounce radio signals off the moon, then someone else on Earth receives the reflection. This is called earth-moon-earth communication. Anyone on Earth who can see the moon can potentially catch the signal with another ground satellite dish. Well, that blew my mind.

Anyway, not that it's a very good metric, but I wrote about 500 lines of code today. It was mostly for the GUI system.

GUI..? GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. In a game, that means all the buttons and text and panels that pop up on the screen.

Press "i" to unlock the mouse and view this window.

Click and drag those 24 tubes! Yeah!

You can also click and drag the inventory window.

If  you've never worked on a GUI system before, then know that this involved a ton more work than you realize. I had to make a lot of big decisions and build a flexible set of GUI tools. Also, my object data is read from a csv file for convenience.

What's next?!? Well, I seem to have all the pieces handy for an AWG...

Onward!