Cosmic Explorer

[Rassilon]

I thought I would share with you all what Im currently working on... Ive decided and have somewhat suceeded or am heading in the right direction... An infinite universe where you can explore from as far out as galaxies down to hills and trees on the surface of planets... This is the product of several years of different incomplete projects namely the old Doctor Who Universe I did 4 years ago... This is far superior in many ways as it offers a seamless landing on planets where the old project didnt...

I might make this into a sort of game with all those lovely laser guns Fridger loves... Im sure he will be in love with my many green and pink stars as well... lol

Here is some eye candy of what I have so far...













And the Sombrero Galaxy... Well my rendition of it anyways...



Its close but I think I could do better... Heres the real image of the said galaxy...



Anyways theres tons more to be done before I will have a beta ready for testing... And yes its only for Windows for the time being... I plan on having a version without the game extras online for free and plan on making the game version commercial... We will see how it goes but I do plan on having an open ended version out there soon... It will allow you to do just about anything really using a simple scripting system... After I improve the terrain rendering you will be able to add detailed predefined data from existing sources... Not sure what I will use more than likely something like dds textures tiled similar to what celestia does...

More to come for sure...

Oh and I missed this place lol... Anything new?

[t00fri]

Hi Rass,

nice to see you around again! How are you (and the lady)??

Indeed, I like the atmosphere of "desolation" and loneliness in your shots, as well as the colors, of course.

I am hard-working with a big improvement of galaxy display (actual colors from catalogs, "photorealistic" ellipticals and lenticulars!) for Celestia.Sci. Lots of new code...Stay tuned in CelestialMatters...

Fridger

Click for Big!

stephansQuintet.jpg

[Rassilon]

Now those look amazing Fridger!

Do you use premade textures or are those procedural?

Me and the Lady are doing fine... lol she loves the fact Im doing all this again...

edit:
After looking over the sourcecode I have to say Fridger you clever devil you... I was thinking along those very lines myself instead of lines and lines of trig why not use a heightmap LOL nice work and the colors are perfect!

I have a question though and this is about point sprites in opengl... And billboards it seems... Why is it when they are scaled very large does the framerate drop like a block of lead i mean nothing but one friggin point or billboard... framerate 400+ and when scaled... BOOM 40 fps then 20 then 10 depending on size... Would it have to do with a bottleneck in blending or something?

[t00fri]

Now those look amazing Fridger!

Do you use premade textures or are those procedural?

Me and the Lady are doing fine... lol she loves the fact Im doing all this again...

Good to hear that you're doing both fine! Please give my warmest regards to Katie.

The coding for ellipticals and lenticulars is entirely new, fast and entirely procedural. About 30% of my 10937 galaxies are of that type, hence it was well worth the effort . Before, they looked rather miserable (using point sprites). The spirals are rendered via templates as before. BUT there is a completely new implementation of realistic colors via B-V catalog entries (RC3 catalog) etc. If you're interested, there are already some respective 'white papers' at CM: There will be lots more info coming soon at CM.

http://forum.celestialmatters.org/viewtopic.php?t=354

Cheers,
Fridger

[Rassilon]

So Celestia has ditched point sprites all together I take it and is now using cg to render them... So cg sprites dont suffer the same scaling problems as regular ones?

I read that already Fridger... Very nice work and your correct HSV values are much easier to fool around with

[t00fri]

So Celestia has ditched point sprites all together I take it and is now using cg to render them... So cg sprites dont suffer the same scaling problems as regular ones?

No there are no news about galaxy rendering for the regular Celestia distribution. The work I am doing is for my forthcoming Celestia.Sci release, but don't ask what Celestia.Sci is, please.

Fridger

[Rassilon]

So Celestia has ditched point sprites all together I take it and is now using cg to render them... So cg sprites dont suffer the same scaling problems as regular ones?

No there are no news about galaxy rendering for the regular Celestia distribution. The work I am doing is for my forthcoming Celestia.Sci release, but don't ask what Celestia.Sci is, please.

Fridger

Dont have to knowing you and the name as it stands its a Scientific version of Celestia...

[t00fri]

So Celestia has ditched point sprites all together I take it and is now using cg to render them... So cg sprites dont suffer the same scaling problems as regular ones?

No there are no news about galaxy rendering for the regular Celestia distribution. The work I am doing is for my forthcoming Celestia.Sci release, but don't ask what Celestia.Sci is, please.

Fridger

Dont have to knowing you and the name as it stands its a Scientific version of Celestia...

It's not quite as simple, since Celestia already is designed widely according to scientific standards.
For now, Celestia.Sci is just a pseudonym of some sort

Fridger

[Rassilon]

Heres an update of what I have done thus far... I still need to work on the galaxy models as they are low in resolution and a bit blurry but Im trying to keep my framerate below 30 - 40 so i might have to look at other options to get them to look better...

As you can see I managed to fill an entire universe with random galaxies... millions of them each with millions of unique stars... including planets... but see there lies the problem... They are unique but visually you will see a pattern as it still uses static textures... Perlin noise textures rendered at high detail is out of the question... So I might look into something like texture fragments and patch them together randomly...

I am hoping to have a demo ready soon... More to come!

[bh]

Looks very interesting Rass... you have been a busy boy.

[Reiko]

This looks very exciting! I can no wait to go exploring.

[Rassilon]

I have been busy lol

I improved the galaxy models substantially! But they still arent the way I want... But will do for now...