Oolite Bulletins

zevans wrote:

And we've never been at war with Eurasia OR Eastasia!

No, only southwest asia....
I tried celestia, but the fact that you can accelerate to millions of ly/s in a few seconds kinda scared me.

GlobalExplorer wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

for a planets an moons which are supposed to be in a different system to ours, they all look too familiar.

Hm, how should they look then?

zevans wrote:

But how could they look any other way? Different systems, but same geophysics and astrophysics...

Well, they shouldn't look like textures simply copied and pasted from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons (and ours). Which they seem to be.

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 on:



A trained eye will of course see this was made from Voyagers 2 famous Triton shot.



I personally find they look different enough, but maybe I must work harder.

Sorry, didn't mean to step on your feet.

And I certainly didn't want to disrespect your work. Please accept my apology.

Actually I should have confined myself to my first remark: They just look too familiar for my taste.

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 same quality would be an immense feat. And hand painting is out of the question, because I'm actually a programmer not an artist

I am not aware of any program that can generate absolutely convincing planets, although an interesting example is shown at libnoise. This is an experimental rendering I made with the planet they created there. I think it's good but not absolutely convincing:

I've looked at Libnoise several times, and wanted to use it as a base in some of my work (An expansion for Oolite that focuses on planetary textures) but it seemed too complex. I never really tried. Would love to, but I'm a Networking guy primarily, and a far distant, less than #99th place, programmer / scripter.

Back in the days of v1.65, dajt had worked on a textured planets branch of Oolite which used libnoise as the base for generating textures. I am sure the older members remember this well. The results were encouraging, but the project was abandoned due to the complexities of interfacing Oolite with a pure C++ library, if I recall correctly.

I do remember - oh-oh - I'm now an older member!!!

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 texture is 4096x2048. (At 2048x1024 it's still ok but less detail when close). So the textures would have to be precalculated imo.

Plus I haven't seen that libnoise generates anything that even remotely resembles a crater moon like the ones I made from real Saturn Moons.

zevans wrote:

For the asteroid belt / Oort cloud, how about something swarm related? I'm not sure Latin or Greek had collective nouns, so how about:

Effervit (Latin "they swarmed") but it's very likely I've conjugated incorrectly there. Smile

Or "melissaon" = bees, "muaion" = flies in Greek... which would give you a theme too for individual bodies, if you used names of flies. You could then call miners "swatters." Smile

"Swarm" seem to be translated as "ethnos" which is a tribe, not a swarm...

Interesting. Maybe you could elaborate some more, cause my knowledge of ancient language is miserable.

Plus I haven't seen that libnoise generates anything that even remotely resembles a crater moon like the ones I made from real Saturn Moons.

Possibly a Monte Carlo simulation of the actual bombardment... you'd have to figure out the distribution of body size / angle / speed, but you never know, there might be a research paper or two on that out there somewhere.

Effervit (Latin "they swarmed") but it's very likely I've conjugated incorrectly there. Smile

Or "melissaon" = bees, "muaion" = flies in Greek... which would give you a theme too for individual bodies, if you used names of flies. You could then call miners "swatters." Smile

"Swarm" seem to be translated as "ethnos" which is a tribe, not a swarm...

Interesting. Maybe you could elaborate some more, cause my knowledge of ancient language is miserable.

I'm not sure that I could, because mine's only schoolboy level too... if you look at the time between that post and the one before, that's how long I spent Googling and daydreaming about it (There's quite a few classical language -> English dictionaries on the web.)

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

There are a few planet name generators online – this one seems to be the best of the bunch!

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

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 visible with the eye (from space, not from earth), so I could correlate the number.

A real star background may not sound like much but it adds immensely to the realism of the space scene. Actually it's hard to understand why this technique is not used more in computer games, which instead show spheremap bitmaps with endless variations of Hubble imagery.

It was not hard to get the stars into the scene. The only difficult part was making the constellations stand out. I think an absolutely perfect result is not possible on a computer screen because the brightness is limited (a star is an infinitely small spot with with considerable brightness), but I am very happy with the results.

Identification of star constellations is now possible. Still, stars are very small spots, so you will probably need to open the full versions to see something.




Ursa Major:




Milky Way:







I think I will release a new version sooner or later, it would be nice if some people report back if it works. If you have questions can also contact me directly via www.christian-wendt.org

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I do remember - oh-oh - I'm now an older member!!!

He he - me too!

Cheers,

Drew.