Celestia Forums

How about parsing that database with a special function that would turn it into a text file that would then be transparently overlayed on the Celestia window itself?

You could make it look very nice and polished, maybe with even a function that displays the name of an object when you mouse over it.

In fact it wouldnt be that impossible. Have you ever heard of displacement Mapping? If not, don't be worryed, the only grafic card that supports it is the Matrox Phahelia, wich ist slow and extreemly empensive. With displacement mapping, you could take the bumpmap to create a real Planet surface, i...

The way it should work should be like this: There would be three options: no orbits at all, only show the current orbit, and show all orbits(with the current orbit being selected shown as the way it is right now). You should also be able to change the color (hopefully within the program, but even if...

What about a 3D model that, instead of actually containing the stars themselves, was just a framework for the star locations, so that Celestia would load the model and place the appropriate star wherever there was a certain object in the 3D model. Seems to me that Celestia could read the model and p...

Roy wrote:Now lets not turn Celestia into a funky chat program.

Of course not...but what's the harm in someone creating a program using the Celestia engine to do this? It's a very capable engine for many things...

Well...if you want to be technical...if the person being sucked in were to look down, he would see weird things happening, but overall, he wouldn't notice.

I may only be a sophomore in high school, but I am interested in physics in general, and this is a nice text you've put together.

The HTML version would be nice, but you're probably busy, so no big rush.

Of course, if Betelgeuse exploded, we'd still be in a world of hurt, from the radiation and all...

Glad to see more countries are putting forth the effort to get back into space. The more, the merrier...

Ideally, it never would have stopped after the Apollo missions, but since it did, this is one step closer to humanity becoming a two(or more)-planet species.

The much harder (but feasible part) concerns the distortions of the field of view of the observer as well as the (Doppler) shifts in colors. The whole 3d geometrical structures will be distorted depending on direction and value of the observer speed. This has massive implications on the rendering o...

I surrender to that

But seriously...if you play games in addition to use Celestia, the best bet would be with the 9800 Pro, but if you do use Celestia most of the time, get the nVidia cards instead...

Afraid to say things, huh?

Anyways, nice job with the textures.

Very impressive. It's people like you who make Celestia one of the best projects out there.

Curious, but are you going to add a pane for information? Click on an information button, and a website containing information on the selected object could appear in another pane.

I wonder what atoms really look like...I'm thinking they'll look kind of fuzzy.

Right, but you can know both the velocity and the position of a star at the same time

It would be pretty hard to simulate a cloud, anyways. It wouldn't look interesting, either, as you couldn't see anything.

I know that Celestia likes textures to be in powers of 2...and I believe(maybe incorrectly) that the ratio must be 2 horizontal: 1 vertical...

Well...if all you do is OGL applications, then get an nVidia card. If you do a lot of DirectX as well as Celestia, it's a tossup between ATI and nVidia(if you do mostly gaming, get ATI[there aren't a whole lot of problems with Radeons], because it will do really good with games, and still does fine ...

About displacement maps, some graphics cards(mainly, Matrox Parhelia and ATI's latest Radeons) have hardware displacement mapping features. It would be kind of cool to have a seperate version of Celestia for each type of graphics card(I know this would be a bitch, so don't even take this as a reques...

What graphics card do you have?

It's possible that you might not have enough video memory, and the texture can't be displayed...