** SUMMARY:
** A brief review of a new software program that allows
** rendering of realistic space scenes from anywhere
** within ~1000 light years of the sun.
**
**   STARSTRIDER (link given below; Windows/DirectX 6.0+)

I have been interested in realistic space scenes for some time
now; up until this weekend, I was trying to write my first .inc
file that would input the positions of the nearest 3000 or so
stars from the Gliese 3.0 catalog and allow REALISTIC (non-
random) starscapes to be rendered from any nearby star system.

For example, from the 4th nearest star (Barnard's star, a red
dwarf in the constellation Ophiuchus), it turns out the sun is
a bright star in the constellation Orion!

Well, I'd gotten to the stage of translating the data to a
format where it could be read into POV when--I suddenly discovered
something that was so much better written than anything I could
have produced it completely kicked me to the curb.

A few years ago, the European Space Agency sent up a satellite
named Hipparcos; its mission was to carefully measure the trigon-
ometric parallax, and hence the distance, to every star it could.
The result was a database of over a million stars.

Imagine how shocked I was to find a program that takes all the
HIP data and translates it into sort of a 3-D virtual reality.
The program is called StarStrider.  You can go to any star
in the database and see an accurate depiction of the starscape
as seen from that location.  There are a number of other features,
but they let you download a demo version (self-terminates after
5 min use) from their website.

    http://www.fmjsoft.com/

If you're pained by frames, here's the direct link:

    http://www.fmjsoft.com/ssmain.html

Like POV-Ray, StarStrider will take as much CPU as you can
throw at it, so be warned.  I run a 400 MHz Pentium and it
gives me a respectable 40-70 frames per second when rendering
motion type scenes.

OK, now why did I specifically bring this up on the POV
news server?  Well, take a look at this menu item--I
quote from the StarStrider documentation:

  Screen shot 
    Saves a screenshot to a file named StarStrider n.bmp,
    where n is an incrementing number.

Yep, that's right--all the original functionality of my
ersatz include file, programmed by people who actually
know what they're doing ;-) .

Now the copyright question.  I was revving up my render
engines in anticipation when the following occurred to me.
I asked one of the developers:

> . . . If I used the raytracer to generate an alien
> landscape . . . could I use the rendered constellation
> from StarStrider as a backdrop for the image, making
> it look more realistic? (With all due credit,
> of course; [we] tend to be highly respectful of
> intellectual property--check out the Internet Ray Tracing
> Competition at http://www.irtc.org/ .)

Alexis Brandeker responded:

> Certainly! We look forward to see some alien worlds added
> to our alien skies.

Green light, folks.  They seem very supportive.  Maybe
if enough of us start giving them feedback they'll make
a Moray plugin .dll to go with it ;-) .

StarStrider is shareware, but the price is extremely
reasonable (US $39.95) considering it's one of those
programs I've been dying to play with all my life.
I even tried writing something similar waaay back when
I had a Commodore Amiga 500.

Hope those of you who read this check it out.  I've found
it so fascinating, I can't help think you other ray tracers
will too, hence this "Public Service Announcement".


--Bruce H. McCosar <mcc### [at] earthlinkAIRBALL>
Slam Dunk a spammer! Replace AIRBALL with net to reply.

-----BEGIN INCREDIBLY COMPLEX SECRET SIGNATURE-----
Version: 9.09.99 for Atari 2600 release 115 beta.
iQA/ITWASTHESTRAWBERRIES/pb7gNBxROSEBUDyBaH/NSLALOMqtShKoAn3Q6
NXd3425DRm1AJxXOJy5hhwd/THEREDDOGBARKSATMIDNIGHT1kACNByBaH/Nsr
-----END INCREDIBLY COMPLEX SECRET SIGNATURE-----

Post a reply to this message