Celestia Forums

not sure if this link will work, but here's a pic of the planets in the system i'm making around MU Cas.

MU Cas System

left-right = furthest-nearest

4th planet has oceans of hydrocarbons.
1st planet has high concentrations of gold.

is it possible to add specularity from an emissive object? say a planet in a system with a red giant and a white dwarf will have varying levels of light falling on it and two specular sources. it's easy enough to find a white dwarf or a red giant and add the other to its system, but the other object...

star motions aren't just difficult to simulate, they're impossible with our current understanding of physics. if you take two gravitating bodies and ask for their motions, any physics 101 student can do it. take 3 gravitating bodies, and not even the fastest supercomputer ever built can do it (with ...

all planets have cone shadows behind them, since of course their star is much larger than the planet. so two planets would have to be extremely close for one to fall into the cone of darkness behind the other.

i've noticed two oddities with the way celestia produces eclipse shadows. 1. eclipse shadows still occur on luminous objects, like companion stars. 2. (i only know this cos i saw shadows on a companion star) the shadows wrap around to the back of objects. it's not noticeable on a large object (in th...

hey chris, for your next installment, might you introduce whatever it was in that addon for 1.2.4 that made the lunar eclipse for the earth-moon system red?

turns out it was the shader problem. i had only dloaded the executable. everything is working perfectly now, thanks.

Which version of Celestia are you using? You need Celestia 1.2.5 prerelease 3 (for Windows; on Linux, you'll need the latest from CVS) in order for bump + specular to work properly. Older versions of Celestia rendered textures incorrectly when bump maps and color maps had different sizes. --Chris i...

HA! it was cntrl v to turn on vertex shading that did it. however, now i have no bumpmapping. chris did say 1.2.5 allows both didn't he? EDIT - i just realised it's worse than no bumpmapping. the bumpmapping is still there, but once i turn on vertex shading for the specularity, the bumpmap gets scal...

yeh i work in the dept. with jeff hester as an undergrad at ASU, and i actually got to see this thing come together this past couple months. the ripples are caused by electromagnetic distubances (caused by the high rotation of the pulsar) in the charged particle nebula around the pulsar. almost forg...

that wouldn't be too difficult with some calculus. simply fashion a formula for the distance between the two, taking into account their relative motions and minimize the function.

also, running celestia very fast is bad idea. you end up with very strange orbits that curl back on themselves

all my textures are in the medium res folder. but i tried copying them to the highres and switching with R to high res, but it still wasn't there. can anyone tell me they've had success using the SpecularTexture code in their solarsys file?

iron by itself is not orange. that is iron oxide or more commonly known as ferric oxide. it's common enough on earth since we have oxygen in our atmosphere and organisms capable of fixing it into rocks containing iron or copper (which only turns green when oxidized). mercury is much too close to the...

Does this mean you converted the 16k earth.dds into jpeg format, say, by means of nvdxt?? And then made a specular map out of it etc? If yes, you could have reduced the map size easily ... If yes, it seems you were able to handle 16k earth.dds files with nvdxt?? On my machine nvdxt's always crash w...

what is the line to use a separate specular map? i'm not using a bumpmap for earth, just the texture, and i'm using 1.2.5p3. maybe someone can upload their high res texture with specularity??

I'm having trouble trying to figure out how specularity works in Celestia. I have Rasillion's Murphid system and the specularity on those planets/moons is perfect, but my earth has NONE. i'm using the earth16k.dds texture files, but there's no reflections at all. and when i try to make maps for a bl...

you could take the medium res texture for earth, duplicate it and simply draw in the lattitude and longitude lines and put it in the lowres folder, then you just have to press r while in celestia to switch to it. i believe this is how celestia works, but i'm not 100% sure.

you're talking about something suggested by Kurt Von Dannegen (sp.?). i normally don't like to argue against someone's opinion, but this one is just ludicrous. for one thing, there are many many pyramids in egypt that don't fit anywhere into orion and KVD simply omits these when he draws his orion o...

i was using my estimation of the mass of such a star based on the spectral class. super red giants can certainly have that size, but not W8 stars. unfortunately, i have no idea how to edit the stars.dat file (notepad gives garbage) to reflect the true size. interesting side note about Betelgeuse: wh...

chris: what is the new code you implemented to allow celestia to use specular maps as a separate image? i'm trying to terraform mars and i don't know how to add specularity to a texture image, but if 1.2.5 uses separates textures for specularity, it makes things much easier. also, i noticed a star '...