Quote from: calico on March 26, 2007, 12:00:01 PM
I don't understand about the scale. Maybe someone can give me some clarity about this. The viewer is above the atmosphere, but close to the shuttles. Where is the scale off?
It looks like the ships/camera are about 70-90 km up (using Earth as a reference). Your structures are HUGE!
A really visceral way to get a handle on planetary scales would be to download Orbiter (free space flight simulator, with Newtonian physics) and start one of the "in orbit" scenarios.
The Orbiter install is actually very simple: unpack everything from the installation zip file into a directory of your choice. Done. Create a shortcut to put on your desktop or something if you want. It's a great visualization tool since you can actually see what things look like from outer space.
You can download Orbiter here:
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.htmlAfter you download and unpack Orbiter it's about 10 minutes (mostly waiting) to get an orbiter view. After you check that, you can remove the program if you like by deleting the folder and files you unpacked.
1.) Just run Orbiter.exe from the root folder you extracted and the Orbiter Launchpad appears (where you pick the scenario to play).
2.) SCENARIO TAB: Expand the Delta-glider folder and select/highlight the 'DG Mk4 in orbit' scenario.
3.) VISUAL EFFECTS TAB: If you're rendering w/TG2, I'm pretty sure you can afford to enable all the options on the Visual effects tab. I have a single 3.0Ghz HT processor, 2GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA 6600GT and I can _easily_ run Orbiter with all of the visual effect enabled at 1280x1024/32bpp, along with high resolution planet textures on everything I could put them on (the Earth and Mars level 10 textures are awesome: 32000 x 16000 pixel spherical mapped .dds image files
).
4.) VIDEO TAB: Double check the settings on the Video tab. The defaults should work fine, but you can change the Screen resolution and Colour depth to taste, and I recommend Full Screen.
5.) Hit the Launch Orbiter button, the scenario will load.
6.) After the scenario loads, you should be looking out of an abstract delta-glider cockpit. You should see some atmosphere haze on the horizon below. Hit the F1 key to switch to the external camera. You're now looking at the rear end of a delta-glider, and a bit of Earth below. It doesn't look like it, but you're actually traveling at ~7.5km per second at this point.
And about 500km faster than the Earth's rotation.
7.) Hold down the right mouse button and move it around; this makes the camera revolve around your target (the delta-glider vessel). You can use the scroll on a mouse to zoom in and out respective to your target. Unfortunately, this scenario puts you right over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, so you can't see any terrain.
8.) But we don't have to hang around the vessel to get a good view of Earth. You can hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and tap the F1 key to bring up the Orbiter camera settings dialog. We can change our camera target to Earth. Select the 'Target' button on the top of the dialog, expand the Sun branch by clicking on the + sign next to it, left click once on the Earth item in the list, and click the Apply button. Close the Orbiter:Camera dialog by left clicking the red and white X button on the upper left.
9.) Hold down the right mouse button to rotate the camera around the Earth, and the scroll button to zoom in and out. If you don't have a scroll button on the mouse, the Page Up and Page Down keys will also zoom in and out (quickly!).
10.) Hit the F1 key again to get back inside the delta-glider, and another tap of the F1 key will put the camera back outside the vessel, with the vessel as the camera target.
11) When you're done, hit the F4 key to bring up a menu that will let you exit the simulation. This will bring you back to the Orbiter Launchpad dialog. You can also run some of the other scenarios. There are some playback scenarios, which are scripted flights that you can watch in real time. You can load those from the Launchpad, beneath the Playback folder. Just close the Orbiter Launchpad when you're done.
Have fun!
If you like playing with it, I can't recommend Dan Steph's Orbiter Sound addon highly enough. It's probably the only really essential addon for Orbiter, imho (apart from the high resolution planet textures available on the Orbiter download page, but that's just me
). Everything else is just candy, really (but some REALLY good candy: high resolution textures, more vessels and simulation features like basic weather and advanced flight models). You can get Dan's Orbiter Sound addon (along with a super souped up DeltaGliderIII) here:
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/index.php?disp=d
