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Description

The Duck is back, and once again he seems to have found himself in a situation that he has no business in.

I work for a company that owns a bunch of arcades. The company uses a complex math equation to determine how many free arcade tokens to give away to people in their restaurants. We can't just use magnetic cards... because reasons. Apparently there is a belief that our customers are nostalgic for physical tokens and tickets. I haven't yet met one of these people but I am assured they are out there. I mean, plenty of people SAY they are nostalgic for such things and maybe they are... for about 5 minutes, and then you realize why arcades ditched tokens and tickets in the first place. It's also somewhat irrelevant as using the magnetic cards certainly would not make the issue any easier to solve.

What does all this have to do with an IT systems guy? Well, it should be nothing... except they want the POS system to handle the calculations and dispensation of the tokens. Only problem is the POS system doesn't have the ability to handle calculating and dispensing tokens. Guess who's job it is to make it? After a great deal of money changes hands, three good solid cases of minor electrocution, no less than 11 separate override scripts and the complete shorting out of one POS terminal motherboard we managed to hammer out a hacked together solution that does some very creative (and perhaps legally dubious) electronic gymnastics to calculate and dispense these tokens using one of those desktop automatic change dispensers you see at the grocery store.

Great! Right? Well... not so much. In order to maintain their own relevance certain people of reasonably high authority have decided that the best way to do business is to throw darts at the wall* and every few weeks to couple months change the way these tokens are calculated and how they are dispensed and how they are tracked (*This is an assumption, I have no idea how they come to these decisions). Read the previous paragraph of this rant over again and increment your loop counter by 1.

This fuckery has already spawned 3 different Photoshop memes (...and now one 3D render) between me and the vendor that is assisting me. He is about done with me... I think I owe him a fancy dinner or something next time he comes to town.

Also, someone asked me why there is a wrench and a few gears on the table. I don't know. Why do people ask me so many questions? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those big token machines? Neither have I. You don't know, there might be big ole brass gears in there and nuts requiring the use of a wrench.

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The Token machine was modeled off of the classic red and black token machines that you see all over the place. I messed up and didn't notice that the "token" machines have a slot to change quarters into tokens, so technically this is a "change" machine, but whatever.

The coin pusher was modeled after a Monopoly coin pusher machine.

This was my first attempt at using Lightwave 2018s bullet dynamics physics engine to make the piles of tokens. Originally I wanted to use a lot more but just what I have was making my computer cry. It took a very very very long time to calculate and render the dynamics. It also took a long time to get the coins to behave like coins and not little rubber discs. One of these days Newtek is going to surprise me and fix that annoying problem with objects and particles falling through their collision objects and have objects stop jittering around and neatly come to rest, but today is not that day.

There was more that I wanted to do but unfortunately I got to a point where I just had to accept the image for what it was and call it done.

Rendered in Lightwave 3D 2018 Some textures made in Photoshop CS6.

Description

The Duck is back, and once again he seems to have found himself in a situation that he has no business in.

I work for a company that owns a bunch of arcades. The company uses a complex math equation to determine how many free arcade tokens to give away to people in their restaurants. We can't just use magnetic cards... because reasons. Apparently there is a belief that our customers are nostalgic for physical tokens and tickets. I haven't yet met one of these people but I am assured they are out there. I mean, plenty of people SAY they are nostalgic for such things and maybe they are... for about 5 minutes, and then you realize why arcades ditched tokens and tickets in the first place. It's also somewhat irrelevant as using the magnetic cards certainly would not make the issue any easier to solve.

What does all this have to do with an IT systems guy? Well, it should be nothing... except they want the POS system to handle the calculations and dispensation of the tokens. Only problem is the POS system doesn't have the ability to handle calculating and dispensing tokens. Guess who's job it is to make it? After a great deal of money changes hands, three good solid cases of minor electrocution, no less than 11 separate override scripts and the complete shorting out of one POS terminal motherboard we managed to hammer out a hacked together solution that does some very creative (and perhaps legally dubious) electronic gymnastics to calculate and dispense these tokens using one of those desktop automatic change dispensers you see at the grocery store.

Great! Right? Well... not so much. In order to maintain their own relevance certain people of reasonably high authority have decided that the best way to do business is to throw darts at the wall* and every few weeks to couple months change the way these tokens are calculated and how they are dispensed and how they are tracked (*This is an assumption, I have no idea how they come to these decisions). Read the previous paragraph of this rant over again and increment your loop counter by 1.

This fuckery has already spawned 3 different Photoshop memes (...and now one 3D render) between me and the vendor that is assisting me. He is about done with me... I think I owe him a fancy dinner or something next time he comes to town.

Also, someone asked me why there is a wrench and a few gears on the table. I don't know. Why do people ask me so many questions? Have you ever seen the inside of one of those big token machines? Neither have I. You don't know, there might be big ole brass gears in there and nuts requiring the use of a wrench.

================

The Token machine was modeled off of the classic red and black token machines that you see all over the place. I messed up and didn't notice that the "token" machines have a slot to change quarters into tokens, so technically this is a "change" machine, but whatever.

The coin pusher was modeled after a Monopoly coin pusher machine.

This was my first attempt at using Lightwave 2018s bullet dynamics physics engine to make the piles of tokens. Originally I wanted to use a lot more but just what I have was making my computer cry. It took a very very very long time to calculate and render the dynamics. It also took a long time to get the coins to behave like coins and not little rubber discs. One of these days Newtek is going to surprise me and fix that annoying problem with objects and particles falling through their collision objects and have objects stop jittering around and neatly come to rest, but today is not that day.

There was more that I wanted to do but unfortunately I got to a point where I just had to accept the image for what it was and call it done.

Rendered in Lightwave 3D 2018 Some textures made in Photoshop CS6.