Celestia Forums

Are there any plans on changing how stars are rendered at close-up? I don't find their appearance to be very convincing. I know that in some video games if you turn the camera directly at the sun, other objects start looking sort of washed out by the sun's intensity, which is a pretty good effect IMO.

Some preliminary High Dynamic Range code already exists in Celestia, but you have to compile Celestia from sourcecode to enable it. Unfortunately, the person who wrote it hasn't been heard from for a while, so it isn't clear how soon it'll be fully implemented.

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One thing i would like to see implemented is gravitational lensing for massive objects like neutron stars. Due to relativistic light deflection more than half of the surface is visible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_stars

One might as well simulate lensing of background sources.
Sounds complicated

Funny thing is that windows 3.1 had a screen saver that would warp the background IIRC

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na is was a circle that would bounce across the screen that would distort the desktop. It might have been win 95. I don't remember. My point was that its not that resource intensive.

The screensaver you're talking about was "Science", came with Windows 98. I remember it

I'm not sure that did a very accurate representation though, but it's been a while since I've seen it.

Edit: Found it on YouTube at least.
And of course, this distortion bounces across the screen.

that might be it. ok not as stellar as i remember (pun intended) such an effect might be added at the same time as the HDR lighting as it looks like a good deal of graphics will be overhauled.