Cheers Brun! Yeah, I tried to pull off a crazy ivan too :>, but that's tough using the keyboard. The next level for the firefly vessel in orbiter would be to have the engine rotation linked to the rotation controls, or at least tied to the joystick via some plugin logic.
RE: modding for orbiter
I've successfully created a solar system for orbiter (one of five solar systems for the Verse based on a celestia concept, back before the official map came out) and it's actually pretty straightforward, you can do it with just text .cfg files (one for the solar system itself, just listing the objects in the system, and one for each planet/moon in the system; optionally: a cfg file for each landing base) and equilateral image files for the planet/moon surface maps.
Using a tool like US, you can get your orbital elements, masses, etc., to put in the .cfg files. One thing that US can't give you is atmospheric pressure, you'll have to deduce that yourself. If you wanted to be REALLY accurate, you can write a .dll for each celestial object, but that's not _necessary_.
You need to create equilateral projection images for the planet/moon maps, like these:
(WARNING: LARGE FILES!)
http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/examples/complexplanet/images/planet.jpghttp://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/EarthObservation/globcover/globcover_MOSAIC_H.jpghttp://thefucklub.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/8-planet-jupiter-map.jpgYou should have at least one (color) image for the surface and another (b/w) image for the land/sea mask (for any planets w/water). If you want clouds, you'll need a cloud image (can be color) and a cloud mask image (b/w, for transparency, etc.).
Orbiter supports planetary image map up to 32k x 16k pixels (at least I think so, the old limit was 16k x 8k), I haven't generated anything larger than 8k x 4k yet (software/memory requirements to generate and process images larger than this have limited me so far, and it takes a LONG time to render).
There are various ways to create these images. I've used Lunarcell for Photoshop ($) as a basis (getting coastlines, land/sea masks, etc.) and then processed the results further in PS. I've also used Fractal Terrains Pro, followed by some processing in Wilbur and PS. There's some free software floating around that can do essentially the same stuff, but cruder, for example:
http://www.gharat.net/pages/planetgen.htmlhttp://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=2542HINT: Use bump maps w/color images produced by these software, with the light source high (~80 degrees above ground plane). I think that all of the software I mention above can produce bump maps along with associated color surface maps. You can process a color image map in PS w/a bump map and I'd be surprised if GIMP or Paint.NET don't have some kind of plugin/filter that can do this too.
However, nothing that I've found can produce really good (realistic) planetary maps out of the box. You can easily get a crude aproximation though, and something interesting with some work.
Honestly, the best looking maps are processed GIMP/PS composites of real planet maps, with judicious use of a clone tool and some adjustment layers. There are some higher resolution maps floating around on the web (ex.
http://freebitmaps.blogspot.com/), and really hi-res maps can be bought (
http://planetpixelemporium.com/index.php).
There's a free tool that makes some interesting gas giant textures (note: there's a separate patch to download):
http://bruckner.50megs.com/Download/Program/planet_texture_generator_v2/http://bruckner.50megs.com/Download/Program/planet_texture_generator_v2_patch/planet_texture_generator_v2_patch.zipOnce you get your planet image maps, there's a free command line tool called pltex in the Orbiter /Utils folder. You run that tool to covert your images into Orbiter's .tex image format.
Voila!
Yeah, it takes some effort, but the folks on the Orbiter forums are helpful, and checking out some of the solar system mods on Orbiter Hanger can be informative.
Cheers
Topic: Orbiter Mods (Read 11643 times)
