Celestia Forums

Hi , I'm new to these forums, but I've been using celestia for quite some time now, I love this engine, the scalability of it is amazing, Im quite interested in opengl, but obviously don't have the same experience as you guys, I wrote a simple model viewer, with texture mapping, detail, SDL, etc. some simple particle effects and am now playing around with height maps, I was wondering if there would be interest in impelemnting a heightmap for planets, and extra detail for extreme close ups. I think this could be really nice especially for mars and some of the more extravogant moons, and also maybe particle effects for comet trails and such. I'm sure ye have thought of this before and lots of other nice features, but is it just a matter of too much coding?
or would there be substantial interest to do something like this? I would be willing to go it alone but it would make it a whole lot easier if i had help , especially considering the celestia code is quite large and im relitavely unexperienced at opengl O_o. A few pointers in the right direction would be appreciated and also all my coding experience is on *nix, would this be a problem?
Im really interested in both astronomy(physics) and opengl so this is an ideal project for me, I also have ALOT of free time at the moment, hehe,
anyone interested ?

nadir wrote: I wrote a simple model viewer, with texture mapping, detail, SDL, etc. some simple particle effects and am now playing around with height maps, I was wondering if there would be interest in impelemnting a heightmap for planets, and extra detail for extreme close ups. I think this could be really nice especially for mars and some of the more extravogant moons, and also maybe particle effects for comet trails and such. anyone interested ?

Hello nadir, first of all welcome on board!
Regarding your offer, I speak for myself and give you my blessing, but I'm sure that you'll receive a lot of "yes! sure!" and so on by a lot of people here.
Your proposal is about improvements that are very interesting for Celestians, because could solve some graphic problems that up to now are still alive (too many more important things to be added).
Just for an example, I think that particle effects could be added for Io moon volcanic plumes too, that up to now are rendered using comet tails (ugh! but better than nothing, anyhow).
So, from me a big big "please go on", and to Chris and the other Celestia creators "please help him".
Thank you very much.
By

Andrea

Hi, Nadir

ANDREA wrote:So, from me a big big "please go on", and to Chris and the other Celestia creators "please help him". Thank you very much

I agree: Andrea spoke very well for a lot of Celestians, like me! Do it, Share it ! Jeam

yes! sure!

Look at this
http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5661&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
at page 3 there is somting about increasing decreasing topologie.

Heightmap, do you mean displacement map?(this would be realy great)

Just for an example, I think that particle effects could be added for Io moon volcanic plumes too, that up to now are rendered using comet tails (ugh! but better than nothing, anyhow).

??? but comet tails can devinetly use some particles IMO.

Welcome, Dominik

Thanks for your replies and interest,
By a Heightmap i simply mean, creating non-flat planet surfaces. For example one could read in a raw image file (grey scale) for earth, and parse it , assigning a different height value for each pixel, this would create contures and such, providing much nicer closeups.
Especially since afaik there is a hightmap available for mars, which would be just awesome to have implemented in celestia.
I understand that everyone wants all these features, particles and what not, but I can certainly sympathise with the developers, it must be a nightmare for them to be sorting though all this code.
I mean the celestia configure file is just short of 1 MB , 1MB of plaintext????

but the code looks nice and modular, ill play around with it some, Although some nice docs would be appreciated, hehe.

I had a look at that thread
http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5842 and thats something similar to what I had in mind, but Im more interested in creating nice close ups rather than some type of normal/bump to improve 'distance' viewing. I think bump mapping looks better on closeups anyhow, It would be relatively easy to do that now that glsl is around, one could make very nice extreme close up bump maps or rock surfaces and such.

Ive been looking through celengine and it all seems nice, ill play around with it some more, I just hope I dont get lost too quickly O_o.

This is what I think a displacement map is, so your Heightmap is the therm for the input (the grayscale map) and displacement mapping is the method to make the globe none round.

The last energy we had put in to you can find under http://shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5525&highlight=displacement+map.

Dominik