Early Earth?

[jmadison]

I found this website and was impressed. I have not delved into Celestia yet, but some of the topics here are very interesting. I was particulary interested with the Pangea Ultima 2.0 work done, as well as a Solar System Generator by Mr. MaxLambertini. Has anyone done any work on other periods of Earths history? I would love to see a nice globe of the late Carboniferous Period or perhaps the Devonian Period. This is for 'gaming' use, as I have always tinkered with the ideas of world designs, and if I had a semi-detailed relatively accurate picture of 'old' earth, I would go about doing a map in fractal mapper or campaign cartographer. Thanks in advance.

John

[selden]

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/globaltext2.html

includes paleogeographic maps for the past 600 million years.

[jmadison]

Is it possible to plug this version of earth: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/300_Penn_2globes.jpg into the Celestia program so that it looks just as nice at the current earth? I would be pretty cool to reverse time in Celestia and watch the continents start moving. I'm not a programmer or do any sort of code, so this is beyond me.

[Fenerit]

Look here:
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/scripts.php

There is an add-on called "Deriva dei continenti" ["plates motions"] "paleographic maps of Earth", probably can be useful for you.

[duds26]

Is it possible to plug this version of earth: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/300_Penn_2globes.jpg into the Celestia program so that it looks just as nice at the current earth? I would be pretty cool to reverse time in Celestia and watch the continents start moving. I'm not a programmer or do any sort of code, so this is beyond me.

Writing an addon that uses that image for earth texture (image) in a certain period of time is reasonably simple.

The only thing is with this approach, the change to current earth is going to be instant, not gradious.
The continents won't move, the image just gets replaced when the next image has to appear.
The earth will suddenly look different, that's it.
No moving continents possible.

For moving continents, there would be a huge amount of images that gets switched, this isn't practical, not possible at all.
There for another approach must be taken.

For fluently moving stuff on the time scales Celestia can handle, we need interpolation.
First, for interpolation, we need a vector based file format to start with.
Most image formats are bitmap based and do not support animation, e.g. png, jpeg, gif, jpeg2000...
SVG is vector-based and the specification has animation.
Second, the software has to support that file format.
Support for making animations is not present in current applications.
e.g. Inkscape, it's on the roadmap but it won't be available in the near future.
Celestia has to support svg for using this.
Unfortunately, Celestia does not support svg currently. (september 2009) And probably won't in the (near?) future.

[jmadison]

I checked out that script and followed the directions, and even ran it fine, but the paleomaps textures/maps don't seem to be changing on the demo. Has anyone else seen this problem?

[Fenerit]

I checked out that script and followed the directions, and even ran it fine, but the paleomaps textures/maps don't seem to be changing on the demo. Has anyone else seen this problem?

It run as promised by changing textures. I do not see any problem here. Is the add-on installed in ..\extras folder? Otherwise the script engine works, but cannot "pointing" to texture's folder.

[Aphyle2007]

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/globaltext2.html

includes paleogeographic maps for the past 600 million years.

These are actually fairly low-res maps. If you email Richard Blakey directly, he has been good about sharing higher resolution maps for educational purposes. They have worked well on Celestia as well as Science on a Sphere.

[fsgregs]

jamdison:

I have Dr. Blakey's complete paleomap texture set in high resolution, with his permission to use them in Celestia. I have not yet developed it into a Celestia continental drift add-on, but that would be easy to do.

The texture maps are jpg images sized at 3000 x 1500. You would have to change the size to either 2048 x 1024, or 4096 x 2048, then create a ssc file that loads them one by one at a particular time, or a script to do the same. Fenerit's ssc file in his add-on works fine. Just change the texture names to the blakey textures.

The texture maps are large so I have to zip them up and put them on my ftp site for download. Give me a few days to do that.

CHAM also had an interest in this a month or two ago. He may also be working on the same thing.

Frank

[selden]

Frank,

Celestia v1.6.0 should work fine with planet surface textures which are not powers of two on a side, although it works better if the graphics hardware supports non-power-of-two textures. Model texture sizes are restricted to what the hardware supports, though.