Friday, April 23, 2010

Falcon Army Store is Live

Hey all,

I'm happy to announce that the Falcon Army store is now live!!!

Now you all can start utilizing some of those points you've been earning, on Falcon Army gear, goods, and games

have a look through the store, and start-a-buying

thx, tomnovint

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Novint Status

Hey Everyone,

I thought I would write a blog entry to give a high-level, general status update on Novint.

Overall, things are going well. We have been pushing ahead on both sides of our business - the games side of the business (using the Falcon to play video games), and the professional side of the business (our Advanced Products Group, or APG, works on applications outside of games such as military uses of the technology, medical training and visualization, oil/gas visualization, etc).

On the games side of the business, we recently released F-Gen Beta 3 and our first two F-Gen supported games, Left 4 Dead 2 and the original Half-Life. This is a significant milestone for the games side of the business - we have focused most of our development the past year on F-Gen so that we can start to get games out more quickly, and with the first games out, we are well positioned to begin to get a number of additional games out. The first two games utilize F-Gen Tools, which are what provide the force events for the Falcon. We'll need to continue to improve the Tools and add new ones, but releasing the first implementations of F-Gen Tools is a big milestone.

On the APG side of the business, it is going well. We've continued to bring in new contracts and successfully complete ones we already had. There is good potential to continue to grow our professional applications of the technology in the medical fields, military applications, oil/gas applications, etc. I'm optimistic about the growth of the APG in general.

All of that said, the economy is still relatively tough, and about a year ago, we went through a particularly rough patch. We had to downsize the company significantly at that time, and needed to dramatically cut expenses. We have generally gotten back on our feet and I think we are poised to grow, but there are still many challenges in front of us, as a high tech, early stage company. Accounting and auditing fees as a public company on the OTC:BB are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, as an example. I have no doubt that the technological field we are in will be extremely significant, and I am of course still optimistic that it will be us that will bring computer touch on a large scale to computing, but we have had to take a mentality where we have eliminated all expenses that are not absolutely critical. I think this is a good thing to do. Often in the case where you hunker down and focus on working towards growing the company to a break even point, you emerge from the efforts in a much stronger place than you started, and I think that will be true of us as well.

thanks,
Tom Anderson (tomnovint)

Friday, March 5, 2010

Falcon Army Task System is done

The Falcon Army task system is done! This is a big deal for Falcon Army - it is one of the main aspects of the site. To find out more about it, create a Falcon Army account, log in, and click on Tasks in the FA Users menu.

www.falconarmy.com

thanks
tomnovint

Monday, February 15, 2010

F-Gen Beta 2 Officially Released!

Hey Everyone,

We're pleased to announce the release of the F-Gen Beta2 installer. Thanks to you all for your patience in waiting for the update!

There have been many fixes since Beta1, making this new release more solid and stable. Along with all these fixes is comes our all new G-Cube functionality.

You can read some information on F-Gen Manager including notes on the G-Cube Here.

If you are interested in developing F-Gen scripts, you can go through a Tutorial Here.

You can add bugs that you run into for this Beta2 release Here.

You can see some FAQ/Troubleshooting issues with F-Gen Here.

And finally, what you all have been waiting for, you can download the installer Here.

We suggest you uninstall F-Gen Beta1 if you previously installed it, but Please Note if you uninstall F-Gen it will delete all your profiles, so please remember your setings for your profiles so you can transfer them over to Beta2 as Beta1 profiles may not import into Beta2 due to the addition of the G-Cube - sry for this inconvenience. You should not need to uninstall N VeNT Beta1, HDAL SDK 3.0.0, or F-Gen SDK Beta1 if you don't want to.

In terms of tools and games support we have created two different pixel tools. One is simplepixelator.dll that uses getPixel. This is included in the SDK as a very simple example, but please note that if you use this tool in scripts, the getPixel call is very CPU intensive and will bog things down if you try to read a lot of pixels, this tool is intended for simple games with periodic pixel status checks. The other pixel tool can process the entire screen, but due to some Windows development issues, it currently only works in windowed mode. We will post a separate thread on www.falconarmy.com on what the problem is for anyone who is interested.

We are currently working with DickDastardly to use pixel reading with his Left4Dead2 script. The first release of this is recommended (read as required ) to run in windowed mode or windowed without borders, but for what it will add this shouldn't be a problem. This is our next push to get out to you all as soon as it's ready as the first official F-Gen Silver title!

Now we'll be digging into the pixel issues more and we will find an acceptable full screen solution across operating systems. We will also be diving into Shammah's memory reader tool as well as expanding the F-Gen script force support to allow us all to start using F-Gen for it's primary purpose...to get us all more great game support!

We look forward to everyone's feedback on the new F-Gen.

Thanks!

The Novint Team

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Pistol Grip Prototype

Hey Everyone, I have some fun pics of a new pistol grip prototype we were playing around with, complete with scroll wheel and some new buttons. We don't have plans to make a consumer version, but it is a fun grip to be playing around with right now.

thx, tomnovint












Tuesday, December 8, 2009

referral code special

Hey Everyone, for a week, we have a special running where referral code members are selling Falcons for 40% off, rather than the usual 20% off. This is even off our special Christmas pricing!! There is a great deal out there right now for people if you can find someone with a code (they aren't that hard to find ;) )

thanks, tomnovint

Sunday, December 6, 2009