Celestia Forums

Ok i have been using Celestia for the longest time and couldnt help but notice how little effect it has on my computer, how simple it is, and how its made. I am a worker of Volition-inc, and i have become inspired to ask you guys if making Celestia into a first person game, wheither it means a shooter, explorer, etc, would be possible. but if so, the options would be endless.
Celestia as i understand it is built with the help of 3DS Max, and all games made have a base of either 3Ds max, maya, rhyno 3d, or something along those lines. They all posses their own source code, which makes me extremely interested with the Celestia source code.

If someone were to make a game out of this, you would need:

-An addon of high definition surface terrain of all planets in the solar system (this would be the most important for the person would obviously start out on Earth and work their way out through the universe.)
-Have bases, and plants, and buildings on these planets, or keep it as real time, right now. Remeber, keep it all as real as possible.
-Import all objects with 3ds max, and achieve high resolution textures for all of them.
-Create start points, respawn points, portals, and effects using a game editor. (We will need a first person game source code to merge with celestia)
-If Google Earth terrain for the Earth can be extracted to celestia, just maybe, it may make this terrain thing a bit easier.
-Last but not least integrate Multiplayer Support.

Like i said, whatever i have just come up with, is a mere spec of what you guys can think up. If someone on here is able to do this, please do, and i will see if Volitions input will be possible.
Just imagine, a mass multiplayer universal real-time first person game.

Think of it, it will basically be the best game ever created.

Hi Skepter,I think what you want (what we all would like?) regarding the hires
models of all the planets,isnt really feasible at the moment,I have experimented with models of Earth,Mars with eg 1,000,000 polygons and it is really difficult to move about,and this isnt particularly detailed for the whole planet.Maybe if we could come up with some sort of Virtual surface model system-so as only the part of the planet you are over gets loaded it may be possible.Obviously as computers (and graphics cards) advance it is going to be possible,though.Google Earth streams the maps from servers,which makes it possible to show high resolution images of a lot of the Earth,but if you were to have all of the images in your Celestia/textures folder it would take up 100's of Gb ,possibly Tb for the whole planet.All the best,Jestr

Skepter wrote:Celestia as i understand it is built with the help of 3DS Max

Celestia has got nothing to do with 3DS Max, except that it can load 3D models in the .3ds format.
Celestia is written in C++ and uses OpenGL for rendering. It is not a game and was never meant to be, so I do not think that it is very good as a game engine. Still there are some tries to use it as base for games, like the MostlyHarmless project.

steffens

Do you mean first-person as in Doom/Quake/Half-Life, or first-person as in Volition's Freespace 2 (which incidentally I'm playing through during lunchtimes at work, it's very good!). I think Celestia's engine could be used to make a Freespace 2-esque game with heavy modification (basically it needs to be heavily rewritten to load only the data it needs - in a Freespace game there's a limit to how fast you can move so if you're 10,000km above the surface of a planet you don't need to keep the ultra high-res textures or the textures for the far-side of the planet loaded as you can't get anywhere that's going to be able to see them anytime soon, whereas in the simulator you can get anywhere in the Universe in 5 seconds or so) but I don't think it's suitable for a Quake style game.

Well if any of you have played the game "Red Faction" or "Red Faction 2", it integrates Geo-Mod technology into the levels. Giving the ability to dig holes in rocks and so on.
But i obviously know how much ram and space all the collected data would take, but what if we made the loads temporary?, like load every 500 miles or so on. (by this i mean on the surface of planets)And allow the option to delete every 3 loads or so.
But like i said the WHOLE planet doesnt have to be mapped out, it can be a certain spot with load times, and portals.
And going to another planet would just be a video showing the travel, rather than loading everything that comes up in front of you, and then loading the other planet level.
Example, Bungie created the game "Halo" and "Halo 2", with this technique.
But however possible or impossible it is, it would surely be a gigantic step in gaming, and would need lots of support.

I have taken a look at "Infinity", and this is what i basically wanted, exept instead of just true exploration, a real time first person shooter.
(However i cannot wait for this infinity thing to be released)

I think you might need to approach the whole thing a little differently...If you have plans to make a highly detailed shooter/explorer game as I have been for the past 2 years....You might consider what I have done....Start fron scratch to learn then look around for the right engine for your needs....Im currently looking to take the now open source unreal engine and possibly celestia and intigrate some of my own modifications....

One thing to consider when your building a highly detailed world...start looking past using such tools as 3d studio max to build a static universe...instead rely on programming to generate a random world using something like perlin noise. Multi threaded technology now makes it possible to buffer in a load while rendering what you see....to make a seamless universe....The new Xbox 360 implements alot of this new cutting edge rendering on the fly...This is the direction to go if your really serious about making an infinite universe to explore/destroy/conquer or mine....whatever you choose....The possibilities are endless....

I doubt Celestia could be used as a base engine for any games.

The only thing I can possibly think it could do is a space-flight sim POSSIBLY, but then there's orbiter for that.

Also, http://galciv2.com looks pretty interesting, it would be nice if someone here could get it and maybe review it. Add ons would be cool.