wheather
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Topic authorchrisr
wheather
is it possible to implement any sort of wheather effects into celestia? just imagine landing on venus and witnessing thunderstorm of lightning with rain of sulfuric acid to boot! or watching a hurricane sweep in from africa towards the carribean. this question is for the major developers of celestia: can it, will it, and when will it be done?
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Brendan
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I guess that it could be hard. But I thought of a possible way, use small textures that cover only part of the planet. They would have alpha channels like cloud maps. They would be like mini cloud maps that could be moved across the planet's surface, maybe by using predefined tracks so we could have a picture that could be scaled to different sizes to represent different sized huricanes move around. 
*edit: I just thought of how the huricanes could be done. Some smaller planets could be defined so that they would be inside the earth and then have cloud maps that are set to be high enough to be above the real earth's surface. Then textures with only one huricane each plus alpha channel would be used on the fake planets and they would appear to belong to the earth since the fake planets would be inside the earth. Then different rotation rates could be used along with precession. But that would not really allow for realistic control of the huricanes' movement. But have anyone ever seen what happens when several planets' cloud maps exist in almost the same place? Would it get screwed up or look like one cloud map, only with different pieces moving at different rates? Maybe since virtual textures could be used to texture only parts of the planet, it won't be too hard to do cloud maps that don't cover the whole planet. Maybe an xyz could be used to control the movement of a 3ds huricane model.
The thunderstorms might be harder to do. Since stars act as light sources, why not have more general light sources. Beginning and Ending times could be used to make them appear and disappear very quickly, and simulate sheet lightning or something. Maybe you could even try using a real star in a stc file to get a blinding flash of light.
But do Beginning and Ending times work with stars?
Maybe you could do the rain with little 3ds cylinders that are defined in ssc files that have very eccentric orbits that takes them right into the surface of the planet and the Beginning and Ending times could keep them from looping around the center of the planet and coming back up.
A way to get good rain would be allow objects to exist for only a part of the orbit, so when they go back up, they would be invisible (like water vapor
) and when they come back down you would think that it's just more rain.
Or maybe the rain cylinders' orbits could be made to carry them down through the surface of the planet, then far enough from the site so they would loop back down onto the site and look like it just new rain. Or an xyz file could be used to bring them down through the ground and then suddenly return to the cloud.
Clouds could be made with 3ds models. Maybe we could have several models for different kinds of clouds and then use a ssc or xyz file to make them move around.
Oh yeah these are nutty ideas.
Brendan
*edit: I just thought of how the huricanes could be done. Some smaller planets could be defined so that they would be inside the earth and then have cloud maps that are set to be high enough to be above the real earth's surface. Then textures with only one huricane each plus alpha channel would be used on the fake planets and they would appear to belong to the earth since the fake planets would be inside the earth. Then different rotation rates could be used along with precession. But that would not really allow for realistic control of the huricanes' movement. But have anyone ever seen what happens when several planets' cloud maps exist in almost the same place? Would it get screwed up or look like one cloud map, only with different pieces moving at different rates? Maybe since virtual textures could be used to texture only parts of the planet, it won't be too hard to do cloud maps that don't cover the whole planet. Maybe an xyz could be used to control the movement of a 3ds huricane model.
The thunderstorms might be harder to do. Since stars act as light sources, why not have more general light sources. Beginning and Ending times could be used to make them appear and disappear very quickly, and simulate sheet lightning or something. Maybe you could even try using a real star in a stc file to get a blinding flash of light.
But do Beginning and Ending times work with stars?
Maybe you could do the rain with little 3ds cylinders that are defined in ssc files that have very eccentric orbits that takes them right into the surface of the planet and the Beginning and Ending times could keep them from looping around the center of the planet and coming back up.
A way to get good rain would be allow objects to exist for only a part of the orbit, so when they go back up, they would be invisible (like water vapor
) and when they come back down you would think that it's just more rain.
Or maybe the rain cylinders' orbits could be made to carry them down through the surface of the planet, then far enough from the site so they would loop back down onto the site and look like it just new rain. Or an xyz file could be used to bring them down through the ground and then suddenly return to the cloud.
Clouds could be made with 3ds models. Maybe we could have several models for different kinds of clouds and then use a ssc or xyz file to make them move around.
Oh yeah these are nutty ideas.
Brendan
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John Van Vliet
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re
Bill and sorce code in the same sentance ,what's the world comming to