Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Drano on May 16, 2011, 01:54:01 PM
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I broke my finger at work a couple of weeks ago. Not a really exciting story, just some extreme wrench turning that pulled something loose. No biggie. So I'm on the shelf for a couple of more weeks before the doc will release me to come back. So I have some time to kill.
I stumbled across this Freetrack head tracker program ( I know--that's like so 2008! Drano keep up!) that appears to work just like a TrackIR would only you build it yourself and at a fraction of the cost. That's right up my alley! So I thought I'd give it a try. I'm looking to use a Microsoft VX-3000 webcam that I snagged on EBay cheap. Some questions:
1. Remove IR filter from the webcam or not? I was gonna use IR LEDs as it's suggested they work better but I haven't bought any of that stuff yet. Was thinking I just may want to use the webcam as an actual webcam someday and wouldn't want to pretty much destroy it if I didn't have to. But it was cheap.
2. What did you use for your headset power? I didn't want to use batteries as a power source if I could avoid it. They wear out and then have to be disposed of. I have about a bezillion old DC power supplies laying around so I might as well put them to use. I have one here from an old Fuji camera my daughters broke long ago. It puts out 5vdc @1.5a. I'm thinking that amperage is a little high but I guess the right resistors could knock it down. I also have an old cell phone charger that is rated at 5.9v at only 400ma which might be a better choice. I thought about just using a port on my powered USB hub but thought--what happens if this contraption shorts at some point and it's plugged into my PC? So frig that I'm not goin USB.
Whatever I come up with I'll certainly put a bit more thought as to the stylin aspects of the headgear. Some of the stuff on their forums these guys have built is just plain Frankensteiny! I don't think I'll have any problems with the construction once I get all the parts together. Was wondering if any of you guys were using this setup.
Thanks in advance.
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check this one out drano...i've tried it and it's very cool...i'm just having trouble getting it tweaked properly...i move my fat head too much. :D
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,305477.0.html (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,305477.0.html)
all you need is a compatible webcam.
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Ahh cool. That'll speed things up. Will give this a shot first and if it works that saves me the minor home electronics project of the clip/cap thingy. The VX-3000 webcam is on the compatible list so that shouldn't be a problem. It oughta be here in a day or so. Will let ya know how it went.
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I built one a few years back and simply never could get it to work right. Maybe the camera wasn't good enough, maybe my rig wasn't 'perfectly' proportioned.. who knows? I did convert it to an IR webcam and used IR LEDs. I even shaved the LEDs flat but I still never could get it quite right.
If I turned the brightness down it wouldn't pick up the LEDs well enough and if I cranked it up even a little more, the 'globes of light' would interfere with each other. I did end up getting it to work but not very reliably. Also the software tended to freeze up a LOT.
Perhaps they've made a lot of improvements in the FreeTrack software since then but I ended up biting the bullet and buying a TrackIR and have never looked back.
I played around a little with the face tracker thing and while it seems to have potential, it has some input lag I don't care for and I had little luck getting it tweaked correctly. Maybe spending more time with it would yield better results but my TrackIR is too reliable to spend any serious time looking at other options right now.
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Was wondering what the FacetracknoIR would do if I was playing in the dark--which I usually am. I'm thinking it can't track what it can't see--right?
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ya, you need at least ambient light...the faq on the site gives you an example of optimal lighting...i've mounted my camera on the monitor stand just below the screen per the faq recommendation, and with not perfect lighting it tracks very well...i'm looking for a small desk lamp that i can toss a low output cfl into...tough finding a lamp tall enough to provide the right lighting though.
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I downloaded both v 1.3 and the last patch. Will give it a try anyway. It may be too much of a drag on my old hoopty machine anyway but it's worth a shot.
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I used Freetrack before switching to FacetrackNoIR. Generally speaking, I liked it, though it was a bit unstable at times. A 7 on a scale of 10. Rather than spend effort making an LED clip, I simply bought the Naturalpoint Pro Clip from GoGamer for $35. It was less of a hassle at the time (early 2009).. Freetrack is a very good program and it's still worthy of use.
However, Freetrack's somewhat dated code made it unstable at times, and I just wanted to avoid having all that extra gear and wiring on my headphones, so I moved to FacetrackNoIR. It is more stable than Freetrack and doesn't need anything extra beyond the web camera. You don't need to jury rig anything. There are some issues with it being a bit laggy at times (not always). I've noticed that sometimes when there is a big fight in my area, the tracking gets a little choppy. At other times, even in a fight, I get 60 FPS or more even while it's on so It may not be the program. Not sure, but I would say that is my only complaint with it so far. It doesn't crash (and it's still in beta, btw), its easy to set up, it's open source, and it is getting ongoing development (which seems to have stalled with Freetrack). I can even move the camera around and it won't crash the program. I'd give it at least an 8 in it's current state. A new version is in the works, here's the news about it from their site:
2011-04-30: progress of update 6
For update 6, a number of improvement are on our 'ToDo' list. We are working hard to get things done, but the official release of the update will take some time. Meanwhile, our donators will receive an alpha-version of update 6, to show our appreciation (and to 'serve' as alpha-testers, of course...).
The following improvements have already been implemented:
Upgrade to the newest version of faceAPI, version 3.2.6. It was quite difficult to get this version working with FaceTrackNoIR, because the Qt-implementation of faceAPI was changed. Version 3.2.6. of faceAPI contains a number of improvements, among which:
Support for newer CPU-types;
Internal filtering, especially the X and Y rotations are more stable;
Improved web-cam support;
For a complete list, please consult the release notes for faceAPI 3.2.6.;
Fixed a minor bug concerning the 'center' behaviour on startup;
Moved all protocols to their own separate DLL. This reduces the size of the .EXE, makes the code more 'modular' and makes future expansions easier to implement.
Started work on 'Axis Reverse'. It is being tested, but some tweaking is certainly required.
Also started implementing a 'mouse look' interface. All programs that don't support any of the other protocols, but do have 'mouse look', can benefit from this...
FWIW,
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hey drano...try the ini file settings wraith posted at the end of that thread i linked...it's the best place to start out imo. :salute again wraith for the help with the settings...this next paycheck i should have a much better camera and be able to tweak it to the point where i can jump into the arenas with it.
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Check out THIS THREAD (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,223422.msg2696856.html#msg2696856). I built one and and posted how it went.
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Check out THIS THREAD (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,223422.msg2696856.html#msg2696856). I built one and and posted how it went.
Thanks Fugi. Looks like a similar setup like what I was thinkin with the same camera. Only diff is I'm gonna use a plug-in power supply. And I'll try to make it prettier.
Your CPU at the time a single core you say? Mine too. Dated code oughta match my setup perfectly! (check my sig) I notice when running AH that my P4 HT is only occupying the one thread(CPU #0) while the other (CPU#1) is more or less unused. I close out everything else when playing. Wonder if I could set the FT program's affinity to run on (CPU#1) and that might help on the frame rate hit thing? I was worried about that.
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hey drano...try the ini file settings wraith posted at the end of that thread i linked...it's the best place to start out imo. :salute again wraith for the help with the settings...this next paycheck i should have a much better camera and be able to tweak it to the point where i can jump into the arenas with it.
Thanks Gyrene! :salute Glad to help.
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Try with one led first. Calibrating 3 leds needs a lot of patience and can make you give up. One led works out of the box :lol and works great. Go to electronic store buy 1 red led, wire and box for batteries ( 3$ total) Solder stuff together and mount to baseball cap with duct tape. With 5 minutes work you have freetrack ready.
One led gives you only two axis of view but is solid stable, smooth, needs less fps from camera and is not cpu hog. :airplane:
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OK so I got the webcam this afternoon and set it up. No problems there--it was a snap. Thought I'd try to load up FreeTrack and test it with a TV remote control before I went thru the building the LED array thing. The camera sees the IR on the remote pretty brightly without any mods. Cool! But Freetrack won't install initially saying I needed a .dll file which I got from their forums. After installing the .dll the program then went through it's installation fine but after a reboot the program wouldn't start saying it had encountered a problem and would shut down. Tried re-installing. No dice. So I ditched it. No good to me if it won't even run.
Had DL'd FaceTrackNoIR too so I gave that a shot. That installed no problem. Updated it no problem. It starts up fine brings up my cam fine. See my ugly mug on the screen fine. Says I have a FR of 22. Not too bad. I load Wraithe's .ini file and started the engine. It's running balls to the wall on both threads of my CPU for like a few minutes before it finally catches my face. But it kept losing it. Every time it lost my face it went into balls to the wall mode again to find it I guess. That's way, way too much load for my old machine. What would Admiral Akbar say about force of that magnitude? So that's a no go too.
So that was a pretty good idea but it's just not for this machine. It runs the game just fine but won't do any multi-tasking like with this here. Woulda been pretty cool tho. Oh well. Next machine.
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Had DL'd FaceTrackNoIR too so I gave that a shot. That installed no problem. Updated it no problem. It starts up fine brings up my cam fine. See my ugly mug on the screen fine. Says I have a FR of 22. Not too bad. I load Wraithe's .ini file and started the engine. It's running balls to the wall on both threads of my CPU for like a few minutes before it finally catches my face. But it kept losing it. Every time it lost my face it went into balls to the wall mode again to find it I guess. That's way, way too much load for my old machine. What would Admiral Akbar say about force of that magnitude? So that's a no go too.
So that was a pretty good idea but it's just not for this machine. It runs the game just fine but won't do any multi-tasking like with this here. Woulda been pretty cool tho. Oh well. Next machine.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, since it's certainly possible that FTNOIR (being a newer program) might be too hard on older machines. My box runs a dual core too, but it's a bit on the older side (~ 4+ years old). It runs the program fine, usually. My point is that it could be your initial set up just needs a bit more tweaking:
One thing I should point out again is the need to install a copy of TIRviews.dll into your FTNOIR installation directory, then making sure it's checked on in the FaceAPI settings dialog. Just download the TIR software from Naturalpoint (it's free) and install it. Then copy the TIRviews.dll file from TIR into the FTNOIR main directory. This is necessary because FTNOIR emulates TrackIR when running in Aces High, so it needs the .dll for emulation purposes.
About facial feature acquisition: every now and then, if you turn off to the side beyond your curve parameters or if you just scratch your nose, the program loses your features and must reacquire. This can take a few seconds and causes the CPU a bit of churn because it's trying to recalculate.. A few easy things will make this go faster though:
First, make sure you have the camera in the recommended spot below the monitor and centered. Second, make sure you have good lighting: a standard desk lamp at 45 dgs off angle to your face will do nicely. (Better light will increase your camera FPS dramatically). Third: if the program loses your features, just move your face closer to the camera for a few seconds and it will reacquire faster. Last thing: make sure you designate the Stop Tracking, and Center Head Position commands in the program keyboard shortcuts, just in case you need to shut it down while in the game. I use Shift+F9 to stop/start tracking and Shift+f12 to center the head position.
Good luck.
FWIW,
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Thanks Wraith. Still have all the software. Didn't know about the TIR file in FTNoIR although I noticed it saying it looked for the file but it wasn't necessarily needed. Have DL'd TrackIR too and will give it another shot tomorrow.
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OK gang I have FTNoIR up and running in the game. Seemed I had to install the latest faceAPI from seeing machines and then I installed TrackIR which of course had a problem running but I did copy the required .dll over and now FT is happy. No more running and running. It tracks me right away now. It is a drag on my performance but I haven't tested it online to see if it's something I can live with or not.
But at any rate I do have an issue with the views I can't seem to figure out. I put Wraith's .ini on the list and am using that. Got a question about it. I seem to have views perfectly OK as long as they're in my forward hemisphere. If I try to move my head farther left or right or up the view stops moving or the cam stops tracking my face. I'd like to move my head less and get more travel. How do I do this? I tried stretching out the curve lines farther but that didn't seem to get it done. Am I backasswards on that?
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OK gang I have FTNoIR up and running in the game. Seemed I had to install the latest faceAPI from seeing machines and then I installed TrackIR which of course had a problem running but I did copy the required .dll over and now FT is happy. No more running and running. It tracks me right away now. It is a drag on my performance but I haven't tested it online to see if it's something I can live with or not.
But at any rate I do have an issue with the views I can't seem to figure out. I put Wraith's .ini on the list and am using that. Got a question about it. I seem to have views perfectly OK as long as they're in my forward hemisphere. If I try to move my head farther left or right or up the view stops moving or the cam stops tracking my face. I'd like to move my head less and get more travel. How do I do this? I tried stretching out the curve lines farther but that didn't seem to get it done. Am I backasswards on that?
Drano, wtg on getting it running! Okay, first, here's a link to my understanding of how the Curves feature works: http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,305477.msg3987127.html#msg3987127 (http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,305477.msg3987127.html#msg3987127). It's probably repetitive stuff at this point, but your remark about wanting less head movement for more ingame movement is really key.
First, the Y (vertical) scale on the Curves graph is input movement, and the X scale (the horizontal one) is output movement in the game. So to move your head less and yet get more movement in the game, it sounds almost like you need to do the opposite of my settings. I like lots of neutral zone and roughly a 1:3.5 ratio for input/output. So (example) I move 35 degrees and I get roughly 100 degrees of in-game head movement.
In your case, you want a higher ratio, maybe 1:4 or 1:5 movement ratio. That is, you move 30 dgs in real life and you get 120 dgs (or more) of movement in the game. To get that, you'll want a steeper curve line from left to right, Not flatter. If you have the curve flatten out, it will mean less output movement until it steepens up again. You'll probably also have to play with the neutral zone number; maybe make it smaller so that it's more sensitive to your movement. I found that to achieve what I wanted, I opened the curves dialog and as I tweaked, I watched the XYZ numbers under the camera view. If you study that, you'll see how much your head is moving in degrees. Then set the curves to achieve the ratio you want. It sounds like a lot of work but it's not.
Also, remember that you can INVERT certain axes' response. So if you move forward and that gets interpreted as a backward movement in the game, just tick the "invert axis" box for the Z translation. I had to do that for my settings, but maybe you don't need that (here a snip from my ini file, which has the X axis iand Pitch axis inverted.
invertYaw=false
invertPitch=true
invertRoll=false
invertX=true
invertY=false
invertZ=false
So you might need to uncheck that for your needs.
For anyone interested in this stuff: I know some of this stuff seems complicated, but really it isn't IF you've worked with either TrackIR or Freetrack before. If you're completely new to this, then yes, setting your curves and axes can take a while because you don't really know what your preferences are yet. I'd worked with Freetrack, so I knew what I wanted my response curves to look like. So I literally got FTNOIR to work after my first try at it. Not everyone will be that lucky, unfortunately., at some point it'll just take trial and error. Head-tracking is probably the most individualized gear around, since everyone's preferences are different.
Hang in there, Drano :aok
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Thanks for the help Wraith. Is it normal that the views only go to somewhere past the 3/9 line and stop? I'd like to swivel all the way back if I could. BTW I did try it for a few hops offline and following the drones was quite natural but in passing them I would lose them as my view would only follow so far back. Will keep tweaking the curves.
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Thanks for the help Wraith. Is it normal that the views only go to somewhere past the 3/9 line and stop? I'd like to swivel all the way back if I could. BTW I did try it for a few hops offline and following the drones was quite natural but in passing them I would lose them as my view would only follow so far back. Will keep tweaking the curves.
No problem; I know how frustrating this stuff can be sometimes.
Okay: actually, no it's not normal for the view to stop at the 3/9 line. When properly set, you should be able to look all the way to your six view (even beyond...). For instance, in my case, I can look at the edge of my monitor, and I've tweaked it enough that doing that will show my six view ("over my shoulder" view). That's where getting the response ratio right comes in.
You have to adjust the response curve so that say 30 degrees of real-life head movement (the Y scale) equates to say, 110 degrees of (X scale) head movement. Picture your had being the pivot point for this movement. When starting straight ahead in both real-life and in the game, that is 0 degrees. However, by tweaking the curve settings, you can vary the amount of difference between the real and the game movement; it's a ratio. So as you move away from 0 degrees by turning your head, how you've set your curve will determine how much your "head" turns in the game. I don't want to be repetitive about that, but it's an essential point. I wish I could post some pics of the dialogs so I could visually show what I mean...
Another thought: depending on the size of your mointor, you might want to fiddle with your screen field of view (FOV) in Aces High. This might help you by increasing how much field of view you see in the game when you swivel your head. (I have mine set for 116 degrees, for instance.) You can set that tin the graphic settings dialog. I only recommend this if you've got a wide screen monitor.
Remember also that you have curves for pitch, yaw and roll, AND x/y/z movement (so you can "lean" over the side of your aircraft and look down, once you've set it right). By playing with these settings, you will eventually dial in what works. So don't give up on it; you can look "over your shoulder" and even up and over (like a multiple hat view). One of my favorite things about the program is going vertical on a target and actually following him in views by rolling my head and looking "up" when I'm going over the top (actually looking at the upper corner of the monitor), like a pan view. After a while it's very natural to keep a guy padlocked simply by using natural head movement. It hasn't made me a better pilot but it sure makes the immersion a wonderful thing.
You'll get it!
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I've actually done something wrong. I was messin with the curves and somehow got two of em stuck at the top right and can't drag em back. Be nice if there was a restore button on them. Since that's happened I haven't been able to get it to work in AH again since earlier. When I start the game with NoIR running my face is against a wall and my views won't change unless I do a ctrl+f5 and stop it. FSO later on so tomorrow's another day. Gametime approaches.
Think I must have hit save at some point. I'll just delete your .ini and copy over a fresh one and start over.
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Been messin with it a little more tonight. I think I'm closer but I'm still movin my head WAAAAY more than I'd want to. Unless that's how this one works. I have my rotations in yaw and pitch set with a deadband of 9 and going all the way to 175. It will get all the way round now but I have to really twist my head for that to happen almost where I'm not looking at the screen! Roll has a deadband of 15 and only goes to 15. It was reading any stupid roll of my head as I tracked left or right in the extreme and it was annoying me.
Translations I have at minimum levels. I found setting them too low messes up AH. Set them too high and it takes a lot of head travel to make anything at all happen. I have them at under 5 with deadband of 9. I have front and back set to minimums. Want to get these other axii straightened out and add that one.
I just want to kinda twitch my nose one way or the other to adjust my views, not give myself a cervical problem! It's looking like I've got this thing max'd out but maybe not.
On top of it all the tracker really likes tracking my face on the side my desk lamp is on, not so much the other (darker) side.
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Been messin with it a little more tonight. I think I'm closer but I'm still movin my head WAAAAY more than I'd want to. Unless that's how this one works. I have my rotations in yaw and pitch set with a deadband of 9 and going all the way to 175. It will get all the way round now but I have to really twist my head for that to happen almost where I'm not looking at the screen! Roll has a deadband of 15 and only goes to 15. It was reading any stupid roll of my head as I tracked left or right in the extreme and it was annoying me.
Translations I have at minimum levels. I found setting them too low messes up AH. Set them too high and it takes a lot of head travel to make anything at all happen. I have them at under 5 with deadband of 9. I have front and back set to minimums. Want to get these other axii straightened out and add that one.
I just want to kinda twitch my nose one way or the other to adjust my views, not give myself a cervical problem! It's looking like I've got this thing max'd out but maybe not.
On top of it all the tracker really likes tracking my face on the side my desk lamp is on, not so much the other (darker) side.
Hopefully you had a chance to tweak it over the weekend, Drano. The program can be as sensitive as the settings you give it. As far as I can tell, it's not really limited that way, with the actual limits being determined by the geometry it can read (i.e., if you've turned your head 90 degrees, the camera can't see the features the program calculates upon.) But otherwise, I think it's just a matter of finding those sweet spots. Without seeing the Curves Dialog in front of me, I'm not sure what the numbers equate to, but the neutrals set at 9 sounds a lot like most of mine. I think I have 9 for most of the axes. I eliminated Roll completely in my profile. It just added too much confusion (I set the curves to minimum in/out and a very high neutral zone). I don't miss using the Roll axis because I can achieve a roll-like panning view simply by dint of having set up my pitch and yaw well. So I just track the target in my view and that roll-like effect just comes about naturally.
As for "twitching your nose" :lol have you tried enabling TrackIR snap mode? I believe Ctrl+3 or Ctrl+4 (not sure) is the command that switches from TIR pan mode to TIR snap mode. So if you just move your head, the view snaps to that vector as if you'd used snap mode with a hat switch. I tried it myself but didn't like it because it was too hard to judge when my view would switch from say, Forward-left to Left. Using Pan mode is simpler and more intuitive to me. BUT, you do have that choice so it's yet one more way to do it.
FWIW,
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I've been using one. I spent a whole $4.38. And yea, it is a little tricky getting it set up the way you want it but it works great for the money.
I'm just using the red LED's. I've wired it for the 5-volt USB.
If your a cheapskate like me and you want the infared LED's. I suggest you tear up some old TV remotes for the LED's.
And for all you guys that are using the Track-IR and have a problem with the backet breaking you might try this.
For a bracket I use a cap. I cut a piece of tin roofing flashing into something of a Y shape. You can bend the short ends of the Y up and drill holes for the LED's.
You do the same with the long end making it the LED for the top. Also paint it flat black to reduce any reflection. Get killed and throw it at the wall, you ain't gonna hurt it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuC7uYV3xcA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuC7uYV3xcA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL)
<S> Bellator
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Gave up on mine. Could get it to work OK offline but it wasn't cuttin it for me for online play. It's not the setup but more of my current machine isn't up to it. Next generation of Drano's PC for sure.
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Gah my Emagin VR Headset has died :bhead
Admittedly it's given me 5 years of awesome 3d stereo head tracked gaming. There's a new headset due from vuzix but not til august, looks like I need an interim solution. Might give the face track thing a go.
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OK got FTNOIR running, and the tir dll, but in AH it comes up with the face in the cockpit floor and no movements. Tried wraithes ini... no joy, anyone got any pointers?