Solar System Modeler

Ok, this is by far not complete. I havent even started the information and teaching portion, just trying to hammer out the fly around details.

Lots of bugs in this like
o Orbit lines flicker and dont line up with moon/planet
o Sun Corona vanishes when you auto fly
o Sometimes it takes multiple hits to make buttons work
o Auto Orbit on planet/moon direct click not correct
o Background sometimes vanishes during a transit
o Bleeding smear effect when coming to orbit bigger moons

There are plenty more, those are just off the top of my head. I'm lookin more for how well the program runs for people as is. What kind of FPS you get, etc. When you get near a system like Jupiter or Saturn, how bad is the hitches while the moon meshes/textures load? stuff like that.

When you select a planet/moon and go there it will orbit it till you cancel the action. If you select the ticket or zigzag then it will move to the planet/moon for 15 to 30 seconds, then go to the next. Ticket selects next target randomly, zig zag selects the targets in sequential order (ie. Sol, Mercery, Venus, Earth, Luna, Mars, Phobos, Deimos, etc)

Lots of plans for things to do yet, but I wanted to present at least SOMETHING to everyone for all the help I've gotten so far. The file is just under 6 meg (the packer program bloated my original 4 meg size.

This is a quick release. Altering the REZ increases/decreases how much detail in the spheres there are. I think 16 is quite good enough. DETAIL will either give the lowest graphic level (textures only for main planets at crappy gfx level while rest of stuff is just a white sphere) or highest (lots of graphics, but still dont have for everything).

I tried to make it gfx resolution friendly, but some of the smaller ones wont show the progress bar at the beginning. On my 2.66 ghz system it takes about 3 - 5 seconds to load the core files before the program starts.

F12 takes screenshots and stores them in the "screenshot" dir

http://public.w3site.us/SSModel/ss.zip

the screenshots are impressive
its kool that you can do something like thsi for your daughter putting coding to good use :)
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=37046

the waiting is the hardest part ... 3 hours and no comments (other than kcob posting the image link for me)...just wondering if it even runs on other computers ?

interesting stuff..but the sun keeps sticking to my mouse and i end up dragging it all over screen..

my kids are still playin with it

Really? I never experienced anything like that <blank look> I've no clue why it would do that. Anyone else get that?

I wasn't really sure what to do - have no middle mouse button. I left it on it's own for about 10 mins and got a MAV also.

p.s. Looks nice though.

i wanted this to work as my youngest is into this sort of thing

problem..not just the sun..it freezes and doesnt clear and redraw..im trying to figure out the combination of buttons im pressing that causes it


also we couldnt figure out the controls..i think navigation by spaceship or voyager (fly around) would work for kids...if you wanted info on the planet then use a fire button to fire off a probe...so they feel part of everything there in control...just a thought

-Rick- this is interesting hope you suss it out

:(

Ah. Thats a result of the screen not clearing properly. I'll look into seeing if I can fix that. Does this occur immediatly or after you've done a few things?

I'll also start tying in some keyboard commands to replace mouse controls. I use a 3 button trackball and have done so for years so often forget that a handling a mouse might be different or there might not be the same number of buttons.

By clickin on the rocket icon (2nd one from top) that puts you into flight mode. Just use your mouse to turn in the direction you want to go and left button moves you forward while right button moves you back.

If you want to go directly to a planet or moon then click on the top "orbit" icon and it will open up a menu where you can select the planet/moon you want to go.

All the buttons exept the Question mark button (reserved for displaying info about what you are orbiting) and the blank one work. Of course, the middle mouse button is crucial to navigate so I'll definatly need to set up an alternate form of controls.

Thanks for the feedback! How did it run on your system btw? what kind of fps did you get?

Stevie G,
I've done up a bandage for the current problems. I've tied keycontrols to the mouse buttons. You will still need the mouse to move the cursor, but wherever it calls for a mouse click there is a keyboard key available too. Generally the "Enter" key will select something and the "Space" key will cancle or abort something. The up and down arrows also move you forward and back or zoom in and out. Pressing shift with the arrow keys on moving will increase/decrease your speed faster.

tiler, This is just guesswork now, i've added a cameraclearscreen command in. I dont know if it will help you or not - it didnt effect my graphics so it cant hurt I guess :P Its hard to know what to do in a situation where different computers do different things without having them both on hand to do trial and error with.

I also found that I'd made a poor setting in the orbit cam where the moonlettes were too far away so now it should hug a bit tighter... large moons still get too close tho, another one for the bug list.

Here's the .exe file to save you from a full download, just replace the old exe with this :

http://public.w3site.us/SSModel/SolarSystemV05a.zip

Re: the screen not clearing.

I know in another thread you said you're doing 2 (or more) renders per frame which means you're using CameraClsMode, yes? Just a guess but maybe the cls_color and/or cls_zbuffer params aren't getting set back to True in certain cases?

redraw works fine now:)

but im still struggling with the controls..could do with some docs..exactly what does what...sometimes i cant select a target and sometimes i select one and i go somewhere else

what about changing the text colour of the target planet so you now what you have selected..

but runs fine at a 60/61 fps

specs: radeon 9700 , 1gb mem , pent 2,8, win xp


im still playing with it:)

Sorry so long to reply, took the kids to the zoo today :)

Glad that the redraw works now, was really worried about that one. As for the controls I'd planned on putting a small help file or a floating info window when the mouse was over something, just hadnt gotten round to it.

The icons on the panel are as follows :

Select Destination
Free Flight Mode
Random System Tour
Full Tour
Zoom
Future help/tutorial button
Toggle Orbit lines on/off
Toggle Planet/moon names on/off

Select Destination - Press this and a menu will expand out showing each planet. Moving the mouse over each planet will show their moons. Click on the planet or moon name you desire and the camera will automatically seek out and go into orbit around the selected target

Free Flight Mode - You control the camera with the mouse. Use the Lft Mouse button/Up arrow to move forward and the Right Mouse button/Down Arrow to reverse. Holding the Left Shift key while moving will amplify your movement speed.

Random System Tour - When selected a random target planet/moon is selected and the camera will go to and orbit the randomly chosen target for 15 - 30 seconds before selecting another target randomly.

Full Tour - Select this and you start the tour at Sol, then move to Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. At each planet if there is a moon/s then it will track to each of the moons in turn as well before moving to the next planet. Once Sedna has been orbited then the tour starts over again at Sol. Each orbit lasts 15-30 seconds.

Zoom - Allows you to Zoom up to magnification of 50x

Query - Not yet defined

Toggle Orbit lines - Turns orbit lines on or off

Toggle Names - Turns planet/moon names on or off.

Anyone else trying the program out? How is it running on slower systems? Trying to find what would be considered the lowest specs for it.

I just tried it on the system with the Geforce card in my sig below.

When going from planet to planet using Select Destination, the program would freeze for a bit then pick back up. The fps would drop down to 1 or 2, then pick back up. When it was orienting when close to a planet, I would see quick flashes of green triangles being rendered that I would bet shouldn't be there.

I like the overall presentation. Keep up the good work.

The freeze that you experience is the loading of textures and/or meshes. Originally I had it load them all on start up but the wait time got pretty long so now it only loads when you get close to a planet/moon then hides them when you are away. Trying to think of a way that I can avoid that freeze completely. I dont want to simplify the gfx/meshes any more than they are or their quality would be so bad as to not be worth having them in the first place.

The green triangle flashes are more than likely bad code on my part for re-orientating the camera and draw mode. I'm going over the code now to clean it up to more maneagable levels and hopefully that will also clean up that sort of stuff too.

Thanks for the feedback!

this is pretty damn good...the docs made sense of it all

nice work -Rick-