Toti wrote:As an experiment, I implemented animated virtual textures for Celestia (in fact, this also works with "common" textures).
Here's a short video in (.ogg, ~12 MB, ~1.5 min length) showing full seasonal coverage for the whole Earth.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/d89kep
Some possible uses:
*Depiction of seasonal surface changes
*Geological phenomena (e.g. Io)
*More realistic cloud dynamics (also, Jupiter)
*Historical evolution of planetary cartography (knowledge masks), night lights, etc.
*Dynamics in overlay images (e.g. variations is chlorophyll or ozone levels, etc.)
For smooth animation, you need to have vector-based/object-based stuff.
Svg with SMIL would be very good for this.
It could interpolate for all time scales, preserving all the freedoms in Celestia while still looking and moving good.
(With bitmaps it could look very bad if you used some sort of interpolation when time goes very, very slowly.)