Celestia Forums

Ok, here it is:
The Ringworld for Celestia.



The Ringworld is designed to work on Celestia 1.5 and 1.6.

This release is relatively light. You should not have any trouble using it even on a very moderately spec computer. And there are two versions:

- The Hi-Res version, at 119 MB for higher-end machines
- The Lo-Res version, at 29,5 MB for lower-end machines

What are the differences?
First of all, graphics resolution: the lo-res version has *much* lower resolution graphics (surface and cloudmaps, but also texture-mapped CMODS)
Next, the Lo-Res do not have much detail for the actual ring (for example, the ramjets is omitted, since they are the most complex meshes, and also the clouds at surface-level). The Lying Bastard is also very simplified in this version (most of the interior + the passengers and cargo is taken out). And finally, only Nessus is on the surface, while the Hi-Res version has all the characters.

In general, the Hi-Res version has more detail all around, even moving clouds.

But don?t expect a huge scenario like Memory of the Waves, say; i have chosen to keep even the Hi-Res version simple. This is because the scenario is so huge that including everything would require a high-end monster PC to run it. I have experimented a lot with this (at one time, i even had the entire city of Hotrufan - using 128k VTs - embedded in the surface. Had to take it out, the framerate went to syrup with a 256 MB nvidia card.

So, my Ringworld only depicts the main characters and locations from the original, first novel. Neither are there any scripted journeys - the starship, flycycles and the flying house just follows simple elliptical orbits close to the locations of the events in the book. And of course, the Ocean Map of Known Space is included, with a fairly high-resolution Earth.

Instead of all manners of detail, there is a little bonus:
I have also put up a cookbook, and included ALL my source files together with a detailed walkthrough of how everything is put together. So, you can take my scenario as a jump-off point, and extend it yourself. Even release it as your own after any modifications you might want to do, should you wish to.

The cookbook goes through each element of the SSC file, and highlights some interesting peculiarities of Celestia. It is also a simple recipe for changing the Ringworld.

At the moment, you can download it here:
http://www.celestialmatters.org/users/r ... ringworld/

I will also put it up on the Motherlode shortly.

Special thanks to ElChristou,who helped me cut the ring right.

- rthorvald

Awesome work!!!

Wow...
You sure you don't work for MGM?

EDIT:
I'm playing with it now.

BobHegwood wrote:sure you don't work for MGM?

Never worked for MGM
But since you mention it - in the nineties, i did a lot of design for Warner... KeyArt for movie posters, video covers etc...

- rthorvald

This is beautiful!
One thing I've noticed. The ringworld is invisible unless you get real close to it. Is it supposed to be like that? I can see it dimly from long distances if I turn the ambient light up.

Reiko wrote:The ringworld is invisible unless you get real close to it. Is it supposed to be like that?

Yes, there?s no light source that can illuminate the underside so it is necessarily black without ambient lightning.

- Runar

rthorvald wrote:

Reiko wrote:The ringworld is invisible unless you get real close to it. Is it supposed to be like that?

Yes, there?s no light source that can illuminate the underside so it is necessarily black without ambient lightning.

- Runar

I'm not talking about the underside. I'm talking about the inner side. Here's what I mean.

Here the ringworld is blacked out. You can see only because I have ambient light turned on.




Here I'm just slightly closer to it and becomes lit up.

rthorvald wrote:Never worked for MGM
But since you mention it - in the nineties, i did a lot of design for Warner... KeyArt for movie posters, video covers etc...

Well it certainly shows up in your work here.
Many thanks for the beautiful work. Although I personally don't really
go in for SF add-ons, they are still very entertaining to view.

Thanks again, Brain-Dead

Reiko wrote:I'm not talking about the underside. I'm talking about the inner side. Here's what I mean.
Here the ringworld is blacked out. You can see only because I have ambient light turned on.

That is not how it should be. I have tested it on both 1.5 and 1.6, and it does not behave like this. Perhaps you should try testing the rendering paths you have available in Preferences. Maybe also check your drivers.

- rthorvald

Here is a video showing what it does. And it does in all rendering paths.

http://s22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/ ... orld-1.flv

I guess it would be my drivers then. I have to use old drivers with this card.

Reiko wrote:Here is a video showing what it does. And it does in all rendering paths.

http://s22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/ ... orld-1.flv

I guess it would be my drivers then. I have to use old drivers with this card.

It looks weird. I can?t think of anything else than the drivers. As long as you use 1.5.1 or newer, that is.

- rthorvald

rthorvald wrote:

Reiko wrote:Here is a video showing what it does. And it does in all rendering paths.

http://s22.photobucket.com/albums/b322/ ... orld-1.flv

I guess it would be my drivers then. I have to use old drivers with this card.

It looks weird. I can?t think of anything else than the drivers. As long as you use 1.5.1 or newer, that is.

- rthorvald

I just installed and tried the newest drivers for my card and it does the same thing. As for celestia I'm using the 4602 build.

Reiko wrote:

rthorvald wrote:I just installed and tried the newest drivers for my card and it does the same thing. As for celestia I'm using the 4602 build.

I think you must be more spesific: OS, computer specs etc. And post this in the Bugs forum, it might be a Celestia bug. Try the latest official release for your platform first, though.

If you report it as a bug, include all of the above and a link to the Add-On. The devs might not care to investigate the Addon itself, but they should take a look at this fact:
Celestia understands the Ringworld as 20 moons orbiting a planet, and at a certain distance, illumination for the moons is broken. On your particular setup, that is.

- rthorvald

Very impressive. I don't know anything about Ringworld, but it was neat to explore the Celestia version.

Just so you know about it...

Runar's new Ringworld add-on is now available on the Motherlode HERE.

Thanks, Brain-Dead

rthorvald wrote:

Reiko wrote:

rthorvald wrote:I just installed and tried the newest drivers for my card and it does the same thing. As for celestia I'm using the 4602 build.

I think you must be more spesific: OS, computer specs etc. And post this in the Bugs forum, it might be a Celestia bug. Try the latest official release for your platform first, though.

If you report it as a bug, include all of the above and a link to the Add-On. The devs might not care to investigate the Addon itself, but they should take a look at this fact:
Celestia understands the Ringworld as 20 moons orbiting a planet, and at a certain distance, illumination for the moons is broken. On your particular setup, that is.

- rthorvald

I'll wait until I get new hardware before reporting it as a bug, if it does the same thing on the new setup that is. I am using an old computer and am surprised anything from celestia works on it.

Now that I have new hardware I tried out the ringworld addon again and it worked perfectly, for awhile. Now all of a sudden the bug is back and the ring world goes completely dark once you get a certain distance from it. As far as I know I didn't make any changes to the NVIDIA setting to cause this. It just won't work anymore.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

I see this...



Then barely pan to the left and it goes black.

Now that I have just installed 1.6.0 rc2 the ringworld addon works normal again so it isn't a bug. A setting somewhere is getting chnged along the way. Have no clue what it is though.

EDIT: I found out what caused it. Apparently if you have the 2 million stars star.dat file installed, it will cause the ringworld to black out from a certain distance.

Great Add-on!
Just two things I've noticed however...

The map of Earth is stated in the books as being a polar projection, with the continents wrapped around the north pole. On this add-on (or the lo-res one anyway) it is just a simple map.

And also (though I'm sure now that this is some kind of bug) the shadow squares don't cast shadows. I double-checked to see if eclipse shadows were on, just to make sure. I'm using 1.6 with basic graphics (no graphics card, just intigrated chip.) I'm getting a laptop soon with an Nvidia card that should support OpenGL 2, so I'll see if it works there, but currently on my desktop there are no shadows being cast. Has this been an issue with anyone else?

Otherwise, nice add-on! Once I download the hi-res version I'll start to make polar projection maps of the Earth to see how they fit.

Sen,

Unfortunately, Celestia does not yet implement the casting of shadows by Mesh objects. Only its internal spherical objects can generate shadows (eclipses).