aromanro / solarsystem Goto Github PK

As the title says.

I don't recall how many of the textures used for bump/normal mapping are normal maps and how many are height maps, but for the later ones parallax mapping could be used, that should improve the appearance of '3D' effect.

Shadow implementation is pretty basic, there are various ways to improve it.

I implemented it to have something working, it can be improved.

Currently following a movement command, the spaceship rotation accelerates up to a certain angular velocity then it rotates with a constant angular velocity (if the angle is large enough, otherwise this constant velocity won't be reached), then it decelerates up to the target angle, it rests there for a little while then it turns back orienting itself in the direction of the camera.

The problem is that a new command during this time will interfere with the movement, because the code takes into account only the spaceship orientation, but not the angular velocity when a new orientation is required.

This obviously can be improved.
It's quite boring stuff so I probably won't change it for a while.

There are textures out there that could be used for the sky that map nicely on a sphere, so a sphere (with normals inwards) could be used instead of the cubemap for such a case.

It could be very similar with the implemented skybox, just have a big sphere moving along with the camera (but not rotating along with it).

I'll think about implementing it.

If I recall correctly, for some planets I found bump mapping textures. It would be nice to add bump mapping at least for one (preferably Earth). Just add an optional parameter for each planet/moon for the bump mapping texture and if one is available for a planet/moon, do bump mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_mapping.

There are more textures available, some of them could be added.
For example, adding an alpha blended layer over the planet texture, such as clouds for Earth.
There are also specular maps and there is even a city lights map for Earth, check them out and add the ones that could result in a nice improvement of the aspect.

The Textures directory and texture files are missing from the repository.

An optional spaceship obj could be added somewhere in front of the camera. I already implemented an obj loader in the ray tracing project, it could be adapted for this project as well.

With alpha blending it could be done to look more spectacular, probably some transparent blue sphere on top, then another trasparent layer with the clouds...

Maybe I'll get motivated enough to improve it further sometime.

A good book on this: https://pbr-book.org/

Some basic tutorials: https://learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory

There is some benefit of having the vertices indexed. As it is now, it duplicates the vertices, adding unnecessary overhead (and it's more than simply a vertex, it's also the normal, the texture coordinates, whatever).
OpenGL can deal with indexed stuff.

It ended it as it is now because I ported it from the ray tracing project, where it made sense to avoid the indexing complexity at the time when I implemented it.

As it's only a toy project, I'm not sure I'll do the change, but maybe later the code could be reused in some other project so it might be worth changing it.

See: aromanro/RayTracer#13

Hello! This project is great, very interested, may I ask, how can I implement it in android?

The problem with the windows timers is that the messages do not necessarily come at the specified interval.

To have the 'proper' planets position at the actual time of the timer message, one could use a previous state to interpolate/extrapolate positions/rotations.

A similar issue exists for the camera movements.

This jittering effect is not something very visible in this program case but for correctness it should be handled.

As the title says.

They can be improved to be smoother in a similar way as for #15, right now they are driven by keyboard and mouse events and time is not taken into account (those events do not necessarily come at equal time intervals)

I could implement a better gamma correction, in the shader.

See https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Multisampling

Many obj files have set the same texture file for different parts of the object and/or the same one for both ambient and diffuse textures. Avoid loading them multiple times by using a 'cache', first check in there and if it's not already loaded, then load it.

They would look much nicer with blooming

Add a billboard in a corner, with some alpha blending, to display info about the simulation, such as years/days/hours since the simulation begun.

I have Visual Studio 2019, should I start by just downloading the code and trying to build it?

Command line instructions would be nice

Everything is a sphere (almost), so instancing would be something useful. It's already implemented in the Event Driven Molecular Dynamics project https://github.com/aromanro/EventMolecularDynamics, maybe implement it here, too.