Hi folks! First post here I believe, I've just been digging into TG2 for the first time, reading and poking at things etc. I just had a crazy idea after browsing the add-a-planet tutorials.
Orbiter is a free space simulator (
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html and a hoot and a half if there ever was one. But what interests me here (late at night, fried from study) is the possibility of feeding parameters between the two applications (not in real time) to aid in guiding TG2 animations with more than one planetary object. Via the Orbiter API, it would be fairly straightforward to write out orbital elements (Orbiter allows custom solar system definition, including planets, moons, vessels in orbit, etc., on a solar system scale - only one star per system though, for now ..).
I could write an MFD (Orbiter add-on) that would do this. But I'd need to know how to format the text output to script TG2 animations. Is there a reference yet anywhere for doing this? I may have missed it my first pass through the online docs ...
Now, I'm aware that for an animation in human scale time frames planetary bodies would not move very far. But for time accelerated animations, or for animations involving the same planets but at different times of the day/month/year, this could be useful.
My main motivation, however, is just for the exercise of doing it, and because I think it'd be neat to render some of my Orbiter scenes into something more photorealistic. The rendering capabilities of Orbiter are impressive enough for a free software simulator (especially from space), but there's no 3d terrain, for example.
