Onto my main idea - in Celestia, when you "land" on a planet, the ground is a uniform colour, presumably based on the pixel you landed on. How about when you get down to a certain level the planet texture is replaced by a more detailed ground texture?
For example, if you "landed" somewhere in the countryside in the UK, Celestia would load a detailed "grass" texture and texture the ground with it.
How would the program know that you'd landed in a place with grass? There'd be a local texture map, similar to a bump map or specular map. Most of Europe is grass or forest, so that would all be in a certain colour - say, [0.5 0.9 0.5]. North Africa is mostly desert, so that would be another colour, say [0.7 0.7 0.3]. In the code they'd be something like...
Code: Select all
LocalMap "earthlocal.jpg"
Colour [0.5 0.9 0.5] {
LocalTexture "grass.jpg"}
Colour [0.7 0.7 0.3] {
LocalTexture "desert.jpg"}
So, when you got below a certain altitude, Celestia would check your co-ordinates against the "earthlocal.jpg". It would check the pixel corrosponding to your location (and possibly a few of the pixels around it). If the pixel colour was [0.5 0.9 0.5] it would load the grass texture and texture the ground with it. Get that? I hope.
Related to the last idea is cloud textures for the sky - designed to be viewed from underneath. Once you went beneath the cloud layer a special, more detailed cloud texture would load, painting cloud formations onto the sky. If you have a detailed enough cloud texture you can already see clouds in the sky to a certain extent already in Celestia,but it could certainly be improved.
My next idea is for non-flat horizons, with mountains, buildings, whatever. I think someone is doing this anyway for a Celestia mod, but i'm not sure.
And finally, weather effects would be cool, with added sound as well.
Imagine standing on a weird extrasolar planet, looking down at the strange rock patterns at your feet, seeing the oddly shaped mountains in the distances, while around you the wind whips you with an eerie wailing sound as rain lashes in front of you and lightning strikes from strange clouds... Wouldn't that at least border on extremely cool? Thanks for listening to my ramblings.
