G33X Nexus Entertainment > Precursors
Galaxy Generator.
Recon:
Well, after a bit of effort I got to my first goal, which was a class structure that could load some data and render one star. Now I start on phase 2, which is generating planets/moon's and as much other information as I can.
Got a couple of questions,
1.I was planing to use the star.txt list from celestia for the basic star map, it's got planty , about 100,000. was wondering how people felt about that. comments welcome .
2.There is also a dead open source project that I found called mostly-harmless, that is exactly what I need. It's got so much stuff in it I want to use. you can check it out at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mostlyharmless/. I plan to strip out the database stuff but leave as much of it intact as possible. Was wondering what people thoughts where on that.
So,
Stage 2 is getting the generator working. give it a star and a bit of general info and generate planets and moons with orbits and as much other stuff as I can come up with.
Stage 3 is getting a simple render class working to get all this stuff moving.
Stage 4 is making it look cool.
I hope it gets easier, lol, had a few dark moments already dealing with Crystal Space. So whoever is in charge of precursor's let me know what you think as coding is moving along.
Regards
contingencyplan:
Initial impression: Looks pretty, but 100% unusable, as it's licensed under the GPL. This makes it incompatible with the current LGPL license for Precursors. Unless somebody says differently, I would avoid looking at their source code when developing your implementation - since the licenses are incompatible, we want the stuff you're working on to be done as cleanroom as possible (at least as far as the MostlyHarmless project is concerned). Check with morgul, but I don't see a problem with contacting the author and seeing about getting him to either turn the project over to you (a HUGE undertaking, but possible) or to relicense the project or current code as LGPL-compatible (preferably the LGPL itself). But get morgul's approval before doing so.
Good to see progress, though - keep up the good work!
Morgul:
Well, if the world generator will never be a part of the precursors client (and the two will never share code) this is fine. (To be clear, so long as this is going to be a separate application, there's no concern here.) However, if the plan is to imbed this into the precursors client then we'll need to talk about things.
Recon:
Well, got a good bit of stage 2 done, I got Stargen working and it's producing planet data, here is a example of some output ( note this is a subset of the info generated )
Planet 8
Distance from primary star: 4.685 AU
Mass: 6.712 Earth masses
Surface gravity: 1.16 Earth gees
Surface pressure: 0.059 Earth atmospheres
Surface temperature: -273.15 degrees Celcius
Equatorial radius: 15341.8 Km
Density: 2.652 grams/cc
Eccentricity of orbit: 0.047
Escape Velocity: 18.68 Km/sec
Molecular weight retained: 0.00 and above
Surface acceleration: 1137.17 cm/sec2
Axial tilt: 19 degrees
Planetary albedo: 0.151
Length of year: 3143.21 days
Length of day: 14.21 hours
Boiling point of water: 35.3 degrees Celcius
Hydrosphere percentage: 0.00
Cloud cover percentage: 0.00
Ice cover percentage: 0.16
this is quite a bit of info. Unfortunately it does not generate moons and I think that is what I will look into next. I did a little bit of work on rendering the info, very basic but here are some pictures.
A quick look at a sun and a few planets
A closer look at some planets
for them moment I am going to do some work on getting it to generate moons and maybe some work on creating custom materials for the planets as I am using material pinched from celestia at the moment and that does not give me much variety.
Now, I have been trying to not do any development on rendering these planets and the brings us the the whole GLP/LGPL issue. I went ahead and used stargen as it saves me a lot of time doing work that has already been done in the GPL community.
The question now is, is precursors interested in using any of this? as precursors is LGPL including the code is out, but it should be possible to use the data generated. I am going to look into getting it to create world files. The idea being that it can generate world files that can be used in precursors ( this is why I am trying not to do any work on rendering as the code would not be useful later.). The world files should be quite small, as they should only contain text. then if we code a loader/Render in CEL it would seem like a nice solution. I would appreciate some feedback on this.
On a side note, I have already run into scale problems ( lighting appears to stop working at 100,000 units from the origin, 3 of my planets are past this even in my seriously squashed up model . This is still a hard technical problem we need to over come. and the discussion of it has seemed to miss the point, the problem is not storing large numbers, it is rendering objects that are far apart in crystal-space.
Anyway, look forward to and comments :)
Regards
whitelynx:
--- Quote from: Recon on November 07, 2006, 07:08:27 am ---Well, got a good bit of stage 2 done, I got Stargen working and it's producing planet data, here is a example of some output ( note this is a subset of the info generated )
--- End quote ---
First off, great work so far! It's starting to really look like a solar system! :)
--- Quote ---Now, I have been trying to not do any development on rendering these planets and the brings us the the whole GLP/LGPL issue. I went ahead and used stargen as it saves me a lot of time doing work that has already been done in the GPL community.
The question now is, is precursors interested in using any of this? as precursors is LGPL including the code is out, but it should be possible to use the data generated. I am going to look into getting it to create world files. The idea being that it can generate world files that can be used in precursors ( this is why I am trying not to do any work on rendering as the code would not be useful later.). The world files should be quite small, as they should only contain text. then if we code a loader/Render in CEL it would seem like a nice solution. I would appreciate some feedback on this.
--- End quote ---
I'm not yet sure which method I'd prefer... whatever happens, we can't include GPL code in Precursors, but aside from that, we're free to do pretty much whatever works best. I'm still not entirely sure which one to suggest, although generating world files and storing them does seem to be the preferable method, since then we can edit the resulting world files to add buildings and other such features. One thing we really need to think about, though, is how we're going to handle LOD and landing on planets. I know there's been some other discussion on this, but the dev team needs to make a final decision as to how we're going to implement things so that we know what data we'll need.
--- Quote ---On a side note, I have already run into scale problems ( lighting appears to stop working at 100,000 units from the origin, 3 of my planets are past this even in my seriously squashed up model . This is still a hard technical problem we need to over come. and the discussion of it has seemed to miss the point, the problem is not storing large numbers, it is rendering objects that are far apart in crystal-space.
--- End quote ---
Actually, large numbers are the problem, since that's what CS has a problem with. :P The trick as far as solar systems go is simply to use a different coordinate system. We don't need to use 1 unit = 1 meter or even 1 unit = 1 km; we can use 1 unit = 1 au if we want. Try to find units that work well for the solar systems. We can worry later about how we're going to fit ships into it. (right now, my guess is that we'll end up having to use render-to-texture for the solar system and plaster that on a skybox or something... we'll see)
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