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An alternative presentation...
Posted By: OldNick <nmascall@btinternet.com>	Date: 2/10/12 10:49 p.m.
In Response To: Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway (Stephen L. (SoundEffect)) Sad to hear that they've messed up the starmap so badly. Makes me wish I'd completed my own multi-universe mapping project… Without wishing to steal Stephen's well-deserved thunder (how could I possibly do that : ), here are a few screenshots from my own neglected/abandoned project to do something similar in 3D. It's a hand-flyable model of the local stellar and galactic neighbourhood, with the local galaxies mapped in rather sketchily. Like Stephen, I ran into serious problems trying to find a good way of representing large-scale galactic structure, and I never got around to solving them. The first picture shows the view from the solar system looking in the general direction of Epsilon Eridani (Reach's star), which appears just above the centre labelled '18 Eps Eri K2V'. The HUD elements are all functional rather than decorative, providing depth cues and 3D spatial awareness. The second image is the reciprocal of the first, with the viewpoint at Epsllon Eridani looking back towards the Sun. Since the Sun is centred, the depth cue display shows a countdown clock indicating that in the current 'gear' I'd take just over 3 seconds (at 1 parsec per second) to reach the Sun if I 'dropped the clutch', so to speak. Speed is continuously variable from a few km/sec (for messing about in low planetary orbit) to multiple megaparsecs/sec (useful for getting about on the intergalactic scale), and you fly the viewpoint around using the mouse. It's a C++ application using GLUT (which just goes to show how out of date I am), running on my ageing MacBook Pro. The (scratch) database is based on a filtered version of the Hipparcos catalogue plus added nearby stars, a total of about 100000 objects, plus (I think) 20-30 nearby galaxy placeholders. Everything is drawn to scale. Of course, they don't all get drawn at once since the idea is to give a naturalistic 'human-eye' view, rather than a schematic map. I'd intended to develop it as a commercial product which would allow SF fans to label stars with fictional names and explore their favourite universes (and earn me some badly-needed money), but when I started talking to SF authors about it I realised that I really hadn't thought through the IP implications. It came as a bit of a blow. The images have turned out a little smaller than full size. I'm afraid I'm a total noob at this image uploading/hosting lark.

Message Index

teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/8/12 8:27 p.m.
O.O	ZackDark	2/8/12 8:57 p.m.
Re: O.O	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/8/12 9:10 p.m.
No GPU?	ZackDark	2/8/12 9:16 p.m.
Re: No GPU?	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/8/12 9:50 p.m.
Re: No GPU?	ZackDark	2/9/12 10:02 a.m.
Re: No GPU?	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/9/12 11:42 a.m.
Re: No GPU?	ZackDark	2/9/12 12:05 p.m.
Re: No GPU?	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/9/12 1:54 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Seraph XXVII	2/8/12 10:21 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/9/12 5:40 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	DEEP NNN	2/9/12 6:31 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/9/12 6:50 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	DEEP NNN	2/9/12 7:02 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/9/12 8:01 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Dragonclaws	2/9/12 6:25 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/10/12 6:35 a.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Paused	2/10/12 3:23 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	ZackDark	2/10/12 5:09 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/10/12 5:14 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Paused	2/10/12 5:39 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/10/12 6:44 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Paused	2/10/12 7:55 p.m.
Re: teaser Galaxy Map underway	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/10/12 9:45 p.m.
An alternative presentation...	OldNick	2/10/12 10:49 p.m.
Re: An alternative presentation...	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/11/12 9:01 a.m.
Re: An alternative presentation...	OldNick	2/11/12 11:52 a.m.
Re: An alternative presentation...	Stephen L. (SoundEffect)	2/11/12 12:24 p.m.