Fridger wrote: Sure enough, I agree. As I wrote, we shall certainly have the possibility of custom galaxy templates implemented very soon. Then someone with enough storage, patience and CPU power is even free to create a custom "template" for every single galaxy of the revised NGC/IC catalog ...
I already implemented this in my working copy some time ago. In addition, all DSO rendering calls are sent to the Model class (the *.pts being replaced by CMOD files). The only thing missing is the new "Sprite" primitive Chris alluded to. I don't know his ideas on this, but probably some mesh vertex attributes (tangents, texcoords, normals, etc.) will get another meaning in this "volumetric" context (eg. a normal vector could hold a 'reflection vector' to simulate view-dependent illumination for that specific blob, so it will be brighter when watched from the direction of a nearby star and darker from the opposite. This will allow gaseous structures to be locally illuminated with a "volumetric" feel).
One tricky problem is how we should mass-render the remaining DSOs. I think that clouds of blobs with varying radial distributions would depict globular clusters in a reasonable way, for example (some catalogs use the radial density as a classifying parameter, IIRC). But ideally a Cluster class should also have room for additional
real stars, for when the data is available.
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