Oolite Bulletins

Glad you like it. Currently it's a lot of fun because I find out new things every day. Some remarks for people who download my demo: - the latest screens (clouded mars, earth) are made with a new version 3 which is not yet released - there is not much you can do in the demo except look at the planet...

I worked on my athmospheres and colors. I found that my light model was somewhat off which resulted in much too bland colors, so there is now some real improvement. Examples are the usual clouded Mars and for comparison the same material on Earth. Earth looks nowhere near where I want it to be. I th...

I’m assuming that by “render believeable space” you mean that you’re striving for realism, not just trying to present data. No, I can't remember using the word 'realistic' even once. I think I said 'believable', not realistic. Discussions about complete realism in computer simulation are imho futil...

<- sorry double post ->

I also had a go at procedural generation with libnoise. Made my first planets with a little bit of experimentation, and just very few noise modules. I must say libnoise is really a powerful, impressive library, but I don't think it will be possible to bring the results close to the manually created ...

I am not sure if I get it. Do you suggest a program should simulate the sensitivity of human eyes and make the fainter stars disappear once a planet is in your field of view, but switch them back on when it's not? No disrespect but that would be one of the craziest ideas I heard in a long time

But if you have full vectors (not just direction) and apparent magnitude, absolute magnitude (in some arbitrary unit suitable for conversion back to apparent magnitude somewhere else) is just apparent magnitude times the square of the distance. Absolute magnitude M is already given. It can be calcu...

Sure, that's all a matter of taste. But to be honest there is currently no game that I like very much. Though I have seen some screenshots of Infinity Earth that look very promising. As far as your program is concerned, visible constellations will look different, if viewed from solar systems n-light...

But those were the good ol' times. Today space looks like that:

I keep working on this at irregular intervals. One of my last additions was a real star background, by reading data from HYG star database. To achieve the best results I show a lot of stars, currently around 30000, and there might be even more. I still need exact figures on how many stars are visibl...

Thanks, this helps, too. Though most of the themes are over the top, some (like the sumerian first names) are quite good.

I think Melissaon, Muaion etc are very good names for asteroids.

However I am most in need of names for planets and big moons right now. If nothing else is available I could resort to generic greek names like Daedalus, Dionysos, Poseidon, .. and Homerian names: Odysseus, etc

I think libnoise has potential. But I think another problem is that the surfaces can't be generated on the fly. This program is quite slow. On an AMD Athlon 2000+ XP running Windows 2000, it takes about 25 minutes to generate a 2048 x 2048 map. My experience is that the optimal size for a planet tex...

No need to apologize, you just stated the obvious. I am quite aware of the problem that a trained eye will spot the similarities. And in some cases (like the Jupiter gas giant) I think the similarity is much too big, I know I should work on that. Unfortunately procedurally genering planets of the sa...

Correct, some are made from these objects, thanks for pointing that out. Others are procedurally generated (but I found these to look less convincing). But I never simply copied and pasted anything, that's quite a bold claim you make. You didn't look hard enough. For example this moon I am working o...