Frequently Asked Forum Questions
Search the HBO News Archives Any All Exact		Search the Halo Updates DBs Halo Halo2		Bungie Webcam HBO XBL Gamertags *Ar's Simple HTML Guide Shishka's Guide for Newcomers The Lowdown on Download Accelerators Red Loser's Anti-Spamming Guide Egg FAQ | More Egg Stuff c0ld's Movie Starter Guide Shishka's HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 3.1 AutoMagic 117 StripzMaker
Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts

Re: An alternative presentation...
Posted By: OldNick <nmascall@btinternet.com>	Date: 2/11/12 11:52 a.m.
In Response To: Re: An alternative presentation... (Stephen L. (SoundEffect)) : That's a pretty neat idea. The display looks busy but it might not be as bad : in motion. I often use an astronomical app called Celestia which is free : to download and it's great for gallivanting around the stars. Space is : necessarily a 3D affair and I like the look of my map in 2D just as I : liked the Star Trek: Star Charts book some of my map is based upon. I love : the 2D look but I fully understand its limitations as well. Thanks for the kind opinion, I hoped you'd like it. The display is admittedly busy (looks better at full size, and yes, it all suddenly clicks when in motion), but in order to make hand-flying and navigation convenient and enjoyable while keeping everything to scale you just have to provide some artificial augmentation of depth-perception and spatial awareness (since the field of view is unavoidably narrow). The last time I looked at Celestia you couldn't fly the viewpoint by hand, which I would assume was because they hadn't found acceptable solutions to these problems. I certainly agree that a 2D map provides a more easily grasped overview, and should have prevented some of the more egregious mistakes which various authors have made. But if you want to eliminate all possibility of such errors, you have to deal with that third dimension at some point. Presumably you've seen those oblique visualisations which show relative positions of nearby stars using radial and vertical lines referred to the Sun. The capability to dynamically create that sort of display centred on any object (and then fly around it) was definitely on my desirable feature list. I appreciate that it would be difficult to make that work on multiple scales and for large numbers of objects, but in all seriousness, i'm genuinely sorry to say that I doubt if the idea of one giant zoomable picture containing everything can be made to work. Or at least not without scene-management (deciding what to draw) and LOD-switching (how detailed an object to draw) software to support it. On a lighter note, perhaps readers who lack our familiarity with positional astronomy would be interested to see just how the galactic plane which you're mapping on relates to our Earth-bound notions of up and down - or at least North and South. In this picture (with the HUD turned off and the constellation overlay turned on) North is up. The nested ellipses are the approximate orbits of the major Solar planets, with the Sun at the centre - too distant to show a disc. The long slanted line running from top to bottom of the image represents the galactic plane which is the flat surface of your map. Here it's actually the far side of a circular hoop 100000 lightyears across representing the approximate rim of our galaxy. The shorter slanted line crossing it at right angles represents the top-to-bottom extent of the central galactic bulge (the yolk in the fried egg, if you like). The white ellipse left of centre represents one of the Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies, on the far side of our galaxy. I told you my galaxy representations were a bit sketchy : ), and yes, it should be drawn behind the planetary orbits rather than on top of them. To put it another, possibly clearer way: to create this image I started with the viewpoint at the Sun's position and swung around to point at the centre of the galaxy, where the long and short lines cross. I then reversed out of the Solar System in a straight line far enough to get the whole of Neptune's orbit on-screen. We're sitting on the plane of the galactic disc looking down on the northern side of our system's ecliptic plane (defined by the planets' orbits), with (nominal) galactic centre directly behind the Sun.

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.