Dear Dan Dixon, you forget to add exoExplorer in FAQ on Other Applications.
exoExplorer is a free Windows application being developed by Tom Morris of planetarybiology.com and Fullerton College. Its goal is to help astronomers, astrobiologists and astronomy enthusiasts visualize exoplanet environments.
Visualizing hundreds of exoplanet environments with nothing more than a large table of data is laborious, unsatisfying and uninspiring. By providing several 3-D screens, exoExplorer lets users immerse themselves in the exoplanet’s simulated environment and see what it might be like to be on this planet or a moon orbiting nearby. exoExplorer lets you walk around, look around, drive around and fly around these mysterious new worlds.
As nearly all known exoplanets probably are large gas planets, and as such, have no well-defined atmosphere-rock interface, there is nowhere to stand. Users may fly around in the atmosphere of gaseous exoplanets, but for walking and driving, users are given the option of experiencing the space from the vantage point of a hypothetical moon in orbit around the exoplanet.
exoExplorer lets users adjust many environmental settings. Users may choose between atmospheres of different densities and chemical composition, terrains of different shapes and textures, moon present or not, moon tidally locked or not, and different types of surface vehicles.
Users may create a list of destinations (voyage legs) in a voyage itinerary and custom configure each voyage leg by adjusting the environmental settings mentioned above. Users may save and load voyages as exoExplorer documents. exoExplorer includes full data undo-redo.
exoExplorer uses the latest Microsoft MFC user interface with highly flexible and configurable windows. In addition, exoExplorer takes full advantage of the Ogre 3D graphics engine for visual scenes, Caelum for dynamic skies, Newton Game Dynamics for physics and collision detection, and Object-oriented Input System (OIS) for user input.
Status: occasional development...
Current version: Beta 0.8.3 for Windows XP (June 2009); 0.91 for Windows 7 (December, 2010).
Mission: to enable rapid visualization of and interaction with exoplanet environments.
User Interface: Visual Studio style working interface.
Data Source: exoExplorer will retrieve exoplanet data from planetarybiology.com and create exoplanet environments accordingly.
Perspectives: exoExplorer presents four different animated viewing perspectives: 1) galactic 3D view; 2) star system orthographic view; 3) orbital 3D view; and 4) planetary (or imaginary lunar) surface 3D view.
Navigation: Travel is performed with user-selected combinations of large and small craft, and large and small wheeled vehicles.
Navigation Control: DirectInput -- mouse, keyboard, game controller.
Programming Language: C++. Program development being performed with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
Supported Platform: Microsoft Windows XP; Windows 7.
Libraries: Ogre3d, Newton Game Dynamics (OgreNewt), Object-oriented Input System (OIS), Caelum, OpenAL.
Site:
http://www.planetarybiology.com/exoexplorer/
Topic: exoExplorer (Read 3680 times)
