Celestia

[Todg]

Very cool freeware for multiple OSes

The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

 

[Berg]

Yes, a few of us have been playing with that for awhile... very cool

Check out my Pics Page on my site

Do a search for Celestia on COTI and you'll come up with a bunch of cool stuff people have done, and look for the SSCeditor, to edit your star systems...

Have fun!

 

[Malenfant]

There are some interesting things being done on the Celestia forums. There's currently a patch in the works to allow the display of more detailed information about targetted bodies - this has obvious application for something like Traveller since you can go to a system and then display its statistics and a brief description of the planet right there on the screen.

The thread about this patch is here.

 

[Mickazoid]

I'm checking that patch out right now. With a combination of a terrain generator macro and some good UPP/image & terrain gen translation, I could see a .ssc and texture generation process (plus the 'display' information from the patch) to create a 'Traveller Sector Navigator' being pretty straightforward. Perhaps a few sectors' worth of data could be translated into an .ssc file and related models and textures on a pretty automated basis.

Mal - do you have any insight into whether the info patch will be incorporated into the core product? That patch looks a little dicey for me on Mac OSX - I would need to install a whole set of libraries to compile.

Rock on!

 

[Malenfant]

No idea whether or not it'll be added to the core product - Celestia development is literally "patchy" . For now it's just best to download the patch and install it over 1.4.1. BTW, the guy behind this patch has now updated it a bit so that the Ultraverbose info stays on the screen.

I've tested the InfoText addon to the ssc files already and you can easily put planet descriptions and UWPs in there, it just shows it as text on the left of the screen. Very nice

.

I'm not sure about using Celestia for the OTU though, since all the stars would have to be on the same flat plane. I think you can remove the existing stars.dat file and start from scratch with a flat universe but it'd be a lot of work.

 

[Gruffty]

Flat space in Celestia??!!!

3D space for Traveller??!!!

 

[TheEngineer]

Its quite easy to use Celestia for the TU, if you assume that just jumpspace is flat.
Though I honestly still got problems with keeping orientation in 3D space...

Anyway, its looks like Celestia can be transformed into another Astrosynthesis.

Pretty cool info folks. Thanks

 

[Berg]

Here is a little utility for Celestia that you can't do without
It's Hemdian's SSC editor... works great!

SSC Editor