Celestia Forums

Does anyone know of any other free programs that are such high-quality scientific simulators?

Here's something I just recently found that you might enjoy...

http://www.wright-flyer.net/desertaviation/eagle/

It's called Eagle Lander 3D and it's a really nice simulation of the Apollo 11 LM landing approach on the moon, complete with actual recordings of the actual dialog between the astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. There was a lunar landing sim out years ago that was quite primitive, so I was reluctant to give this one a try, but I'm sure glad I did! The graphics are much more modern (although they could use a little help) and the flight model seems to be pretty accurate from what I can see. It's a lot of fun to try to land on the exact same spot as Neil Armstrong did back on that historical day...

Check it out, I'm sure you won't regret it!

Wouldn't it be just incredible to be able to land the "Lem" in Celestia? Just think of the possibilities!

Cheers!
Sean

Martin Schweiger's Orbiter

One of the best, and most realitsic space-sphysics simulator ever released to the public.

Bevare: very steep learning curve, some basic understanding of nevtonian pysics and orbital mechanics is requiered to get the most out of it.

There exists several addons to Orbiter as well, among some is: The Eagle transporter, historic missions as Apollo 11, Space-Shuttle Atlantis and ISS rendezvous, and much, much more.

And its freeware!


You may also want to take a look at [url=anywherebb.com/noctis.html]Alessandro Ghignola's Noctis IV[/url].

Its a free space-exploration simulator where you can explore an entire galaxy with 70 billion stars, and a near infinety of planets.
The sequel to this simulator; Noctis V, will feature better graphics and many new and revolutionery features, expected for release late 2002.


Enjoy.


Stargazer.

Direct3D reaches the widest possible audience with the best support from hardware and software manufactures

Looking alone at this sentence this guy deserves a coup-de-grace ...

The guy behind Orbiter knows that Direct3D was a bad choice, but he says it's too late to change now...

Anyway, here's a great space sim, featuring Newtonian physics and several minor planets, along with a possible design for a future space-based anti-NEO ship...

It's over here...

The guy behind Orbiter knows that Direct3D was a bad choice, but he says it's too late to change now...

Why was it a bad choice?

Direct3D seemed like a better choice to me too, but I'm currently at the stage where it isn't too late to change. Does anyone have a link to information comparing D3D and OpenGL?

Paul wrote:

The guy behind Orbiter knows that Direct3D was a bad choice, but he says it's too late to change now...

Why was it a bad choice?

Direct3D seemed like a better choice to me too, but I'm currently at the stage where it isn't too late to change. Does anyone have a link to information comparing D3D and OpenGL?

Direct3D does offer better hardware compatibility on Windows, but it's not a cross-platform API. Most 3D graphics cards these days have reasonable OpenGL drivers, but the advanced rendering features like pixel and vertex shaders are supported only through vendor specific extensions. Thus Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, but much of the eye-candy only works on nVIDIA graphics cards. Efforts to standardize vertex and pixel shaders in OpenGL have been moving along, though, and it won't be long before Celestia takes advantage of this.

--Chris

Sum0 wrote:The guy behind Orbiter knows that Direct3D was a bad choice, but he says it's too late to change now...

Anyway, here's a great space sim, featuring Newtonian physics and several minor planets, along with a possible design for a future space-based anti-NEO ship...

It's over here...

LMAO AtariGL at its finest