Celestia Forums

I've finished my first version of a solar system generator as was mentioned in this topic.
http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=507

It creates random planets and their moons for every star in celestia.
All the orbits are Kepler correct and all the planets have masses assigned to them so the gravity effects work. Textures are also given to each planet, and its habitability determined.
It creates an ssc file for each star. If you make one for every star (there are 100,000) it will take about 3hours to make 10Gig of files.
You can make the nearest 1000 stars for about 80Meg in 1 minute however.

Install these to a celestia 1.2.4 directory then run one of the generate.bat files.

I wrote a big readme which is in the first package please read it as there are more instructions.

mh_system_generator-win32-0.0.1.exe
mostlyharmless-w32-0.0.4.exe
mh_system_generator-textures-0.1.exe

the files are here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... p_id=52323








I've used some other peoples textures,

Credits To

Redwick.
Rassilon.
Manuel David


Franz-Xaver Schweiger
Gas giant Planet generator

Lance Gharat, Mark Santesson
PlanetGen - Fractal Planetary Map Generator

thanks.

and thank Chris for making celestia open source.

Enjoy!

mostlyharmless.sourceforge.net

:D :D :D
Veeerrrry big!!! Wonderful!!!
I'm downloading the texture.exe (16 Meg!!!),
and I have already downloaded the other two....
Thanks a lot!!!
Bruno

Marc, now make one for stars lol...I need a hack that will generate a globular cluster of around 10000 stars or more for my galactic center Im adding hopefully this coming release...but Im gonna give this a whirl...

Also can this do only one system at a time? If it can it will save me TONS of time coding in the systems...

Wow! Very cool! The galaxy is so crowded! And it's just one little corner! It did take a few hours to generate all the systems, but there's so much to see. I can't wait until the gameplay mechanics are added.

Congratulations on a job well done!

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

Hi Marc,

congratulation ! Some of the planets are looking great.
Nice work
I have spend a lot of hours before i know all of them.

Rassilon wrote:Also can this do only one system at a time?

With my first try at this I had stargen only generating one system at a time with another application driving it. This resulted in the OS making a heap of threads and caused a memory leak so I had to make stargen do the automation.
Ill have to go back and change it so it will do singles stars easily again.
Please note that I have butchered stargen and that some of the original functions have been disabled, Ill see if I can ressurect these.

For the time being have a look at starlist.txt and at the generate.bat files Shorten starlist to one or two stars,
the parameters are :

HIP number
descriptive name
Luminosity
Mass
Class
Distance from Sol

Marc, now make one for stars lol...

Yeah, we could really fill our hard drives. There is the option of adding stars with stc files, but I think modifying stars.dat would be more efficient. Hasnt somone already been working on this sort of random star generation?

I can't wait until the gameplay mechanics are added.

Im going to focus on refining the environment first as I still have a lot to learn about celestia's inner workings. There are a lot of improvements to be made to this generator.

I have spend a lot of hours before i know all of them.

See if you can find a terrestrial moon suitable for humans.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone

I would write it myself but I just cant get used to the int810 arch...Its like some crackhead wrote it...64k allocation units bah...

And I hate using memory pointers in windows...Its like cleaning a loaded gun lol...but maybe I'll write one someday...Windows GUI and all...then let Fridger convert it to Linux...

I actually got credit for something creative I did?

Woot!

Does this mean I'll have to come up with more textures?

Sweet!
That was completed faster then I though. Keep up the good work

-Matt-

10 GB!

Thanks.
But I think I'll wait for another 5 years, when we all have 10+ Terra-Byte harddisks in our computers...



Stargazer.

There is the option to generate less systems. 1000 systems will only create 80meg of files and it generates from the closest to sol then out.

marc wrote:I've finished my first version of a solar system generator.

Great stuff, Marc! Keep on with this great work

Axel

Marc,

You've changed the code for Celestia before... why not modify Celestia so that it only generates systems as it needs them, while the program is running?
I would expect that most of the time spent generating all this data is writing out to the files as text. If it generates the systems completely within Celestia, then it never needs to create SSC files, and can do ALL of the stars. Surely it's worth a try!

Paul,

Currently the generation process has two steps (one program per step)
Ive got some more steps to add in the future. one includes creating random names which I do not have the source for.
Integrating could be done im sure. but im not sure if its worth the risk of having an extra pause as a system is generated.

The waste of space is a problem, but im looking at compressing the ssc files as they are created and then decompressing as needed by celestia.
There is alot of repeated text in the files, im guessing they will compress to 15%.
Im pretty sure decompressing will be quicker than generating, especially as I want to add more steps to the generating phase.

Also its much easier to work on if i keep them separate.

A new version of my system generator is out.

Solar System Generator 0.0.2
Data files reduced from 10 to 2 gig by gzipping all the data files and having celestia unzip them as needed.
Cloud textures assigned to planets according to atmospheric data. Terresterial textures assigned as per hydrosphere coverage.
Nicer textures too thought he texture pack is a little big... a low res version will be coming soon,

:D Cool I’m glad to see that you are still working on the Generator. After you released the first version and there was no word I though the project died. I also wanted to know if you are working on a texture generator that will work within Celestia on the fly. Glad to see some progress. Keep up the good work.

-Matt-

Matt,
Yeah work on this has slowed down, i've been concentrating on my final semester of uni.
Ive been negotiating with a lecturer to get a whole class of students working on MH in the future. free labour!, its still just talk at the moment though.

As for an 'on the fly' texture generator, im going to stick to having premade textures for now. I want to save the extra cpu cycles for the gameplay, and i dont think it would work that well anyway (too slow).
Also I dont think i have the skills to do it.

In the future, I'm going to refine the system generator a bit more then set to work on the game mechanics.

cheers, Marc

I know it lame to reply to my own post but this is for those who have been playing with the MH system generator.

Im yet to do a full install of it with the larger star database of 2 million stars , http://perso.wanadoo.fr/celestia.stars/
Dont waste your time trying this yet. (a full MH install that is, the big star DB on its own is cool)

At this stage it probably wont work as im only catering for 4 directories of 30,000 star each. It will get as far as the closest 120,000 stars to sol.
To go further Ill either need to have 70 odd directories, or put all the data into a single file (mabey I should have taken this approach from the start).

If I get round to this the MH installation will be 25gig and will take a few days to generate...wow... if the game gets finished no-one will ever be able to explore it all.

Ive notice that the download stats for the texture pack is huge compared to that for the generator. (900 compared to 20) What is everyone doing with those textures? (Or by downloads does it really mean connections). There is not much use for them on thier own they are supposed to go with the generator.

To make it clear these are the files needed to get the latest version of the system generator going. Sorry that the install process is a bit ambigous eventually ill put it all into one big download. The separate parts keeps the development simple. The readme in the first file is pretty detailed so please read them.

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/most ... e?download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/most ... e?download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/most ... e?download

Finally, i know its an ass-about way to develop a game, the mechanics usually come before the environment, but its fun this way.

Hey, marc-

I'm replying to your post in the other thread.

Unfortunately, I'm in the process of deleting the files. I have been for about three days. It appears that my hard drive may have been fragmented a bit before the installation and after, well, I won't go there.

I looked, but Part 71 is already gone, so I can't give you a file. Stage 2, the texture insertion, did go through however, so I guess I had all the systems.

I don't know how many files NTFS can hold in a directory, but it might be wise to limit the number of files in the first place. Perhaps combine them into 1GB files. A few large files are easier to manage than hundreds of thousands ( does it generate 2Mil?) of tiny files. Just selecting the directory takes a couple of seconds.

As for my system specs:
Windows XP Pro
AMD Athlon XP 2100+
Soyo SY-KT333 Dragon Ultra Motherboard
1GB PC2700 333Mhz SDRAM
120GB Hard Drive

By the way, if you decide to consolidate the files, 1GB is probably about as big as you'd want to go. I've tried making a 4+GB file (I wanted an Earth32k.dds), but it won't happen. Perhaps 4GB is the upper limit for Windows.

- a b i o g e n e s i s -

thanks for that, bummer about having trouble deleting the files, I hope my program hasn't stuffed anything.

I think I might just give up on generating systems for every star. Would be irrellavant for the game anyway. The system gen is set up to do the closests systems to sol first so I could use the big star DB in the game with only the closest 100,000 stars with planets. The player just wont have the range to go any farther.
Or solve the whole problem with generation on the fly (problem with that is that the generation code im using is ancient and I do not understand most of it, alot of work)
Its good to hear that it got through the second stage, I had some memory leak problems when i first created it, youve proved that its solved.