More pictures and design elements that went into this project:
One thing they don’t tell you about older displays like flipdots is the sound they make. When a whole series of them are moving, its like something between the murmur of a crowd and the shuffling of cards. A bit “zen”, I think. Sitting on the trading floor after close with nothing but the large clock whuff-whooshing each digit into place, it was a peaceful contrast to the usual activity on the floor.
Some views of the trading floor and its displays were difficult to find. Most pictures focus on the open outcry pits, where all the action is, but not many are taken of the quoteboards which were my primary focus. I was beyond happy to find this one, I couldn’t recall the exact wording of some of the legend that was displayed at the edges of the boards, so this photo helped immensely.
To get data into the game, I decided to make a physical model that resembled a server cabinet, with ventilation slots and a mounting rail for the memory modules (vox models) that I would be spawning and reading from. This version doesn’t have any indicator lights — which I plan to add to show new modules updating and being read. Everyone loves blinkenlights, right? I do.
One of the hard parts was figuring out the X, Y, Z coordinate offsets so I could spawn those properly in the cabinet. I solved this by making a system based on static location markers. I ended up using the same system to draw sprites on the quoteboards themselves, although not everything would go to plan — some early shots/debug:
Its a learning process. Working through this got me deep into Three-Dimensional arrays, which honestly aren’t tough to visualize, but a bit harder to debug since you’re dealing with three indexes at the same time.
More to come, documenting continues…