Celestia Forums

Hello all

I was wondering if it might be possible in the future to see effects like lightning on the dark side of planets, I was thinking in particular about the storms on Jupiter we saw from the Voyger craft as they flew by. This would be a real cool looking effect.

63rd_Ian

You can already increase the ambient light in Celestia with the "}" key.

Um, Kendrix, that's "lightning" as in "images of high voltage electrical discharges", not "lightening". Unless you're trying to make a funny... in which a smiley would have been appropriate.

Ian,

Unfortunately, Celestia does not (yet) implement "texture movies" which is what really would be needed to show flashes and similar irregularly ocurring events continuously. A lot of pepole have asked for that feature. We can hope that it might appear in a future version of Celestia.

However, thre are "Beginning" and "Ending" directives which make it possible to implement a crude form of "page flipping" animations.

In any case, it'd just take someone to draw the appropriate "night light" images with flashes on them. Those same images could then be turned into a looping animatoin once that feature becomes available. They'd just need to be a sequence of black images with white spots on them; perhaps gwowing in size? Black would be turned into transparent and wouldn't hide the surface below. Shown under a translucent cloud layer, which may already exist, it could be quite a good effect.

If you can draw them and email (address is the button below) them to me, I'd be willing to try the pageflipping part, unless you want to try that, too.. Remember that for now it'd be a limited time sequence: it wouldn't run continuously. You'd have to set Celestia to a particular time and date to watch them.

Look under "Feature request: moving nightlight layer" for my idea on the subject.

Oups ! I read too fast...