"Landing" on objects and a few

donkey · Post #1by **donkey** » 29.01.2002, 20:50

Hi, first I have to say this program is awesome! And it really creates some strange orbits in years beyond 200000.

Now for the suggestion, it would be cool if one could land on the planets with "real" gravity based on their mass. (Newtonian physics)
The gravity would be great for starters, but the landscape to appear more detailed as you are approaching would blow the mind.
A procedural LOD-landscape with heightpoints based on a bumpmap could be used for example.
This ain't easy, but sure would be nice.

Now that I remember there's a strange thing happening when you get to one of the farthest stars available. It just disappears when you get to it, but after you turn so you're facing Sol it appears again. The second thing is with Sirius, shouldn't there be a white dwarf there for it to be a binary system?

Again, thanks for this great effort you've done. Tried this myself a couple of times and didn't get it done... Bye.

Post #2by **chris** » 30.01.2002, 17:52

In the future, there will be an option to enable gravity in Celestia--this will likely be in the form of a 'simulation mode' or possibly even a separate program that uses the Celestia engine. A procedural LOD landscape is something that I want to add as well, but this is an extremely difficult task. Especially for things like craters, which are tricky to build using conventional noise-based procedural methods.

Not sure about that bug with the distant stars . . . could you tell me exactly which star you went to?

--Chris

donkey · Post #3by **donkey** » 30.01.2002, 20:39

Maybe it's a depth buffer problem, here looking away from sol:

and looking at sol:

Two more things, if you go very close to a planet strange things happen like this:

And finally it would be cool to be able to look from a location on a planet according to lat/long coordinates.

Thanks again, bye!

Guest · Post #4by **Guest** » 02.02.2002, 06:49

I should probably post this in the DEV forum, but check out http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010810/oneil_01.htm for a procedural LOD article that i think you might like.
You may have already seen this article though.

Pv