Here is a brief status report about my progress of today:
1) I have decided to generate the DLA points for irregular galaxies in an external C++ application that will be part of the .Sci distribution. This way I can handle
>= 50 000 particles without any noticeable delays!
2) I wrote another C++ command line application (
txt2bin) that reads in the 50000 generated x-y-z points from a human readable text file, rescales the points to the maximal radius of sqrt( x^2 + y^2 + z^2) = sqrt(3 * 0.5^2) = sqrt(0.75), and writes out the rescaled data to a
binary data file. Binary data files load
lightening fast and take less than half the HD space, as you surely know!. I do this with five such binary template data files: irr0.dat .. irr4.dat, in order that the Irr displays look always different, notably for several Irr galaxies visible on ONE screen (e.g. DDO 64, see below) . As a result of the rescaling, the 4 "red selection triangles" indicate the proper size of the Irr galaxy pretty accurately! Here is an example (DDO 127)
[click on image and use browser fullscreen by all means!]Attachment:
ddo127.jpg [ 105.48 KiB | Viewed 3169 times ]
Look at the 4 red arrows! As shown at the bottom left, the framerate with my
i5 3rd gen Dell E6320 laptop is
~100 Hz! despite Intel onboard
HD 3000 graphics.
Here is another shot with 2 Irr galaxies on ONE screen. Look again at the 4 red arrows.
Here I used the same template though (just for testing).
[click on image and use browser fullscreen by all means!]Attachment:
ddo64.jpg [ 142.38 KiB | Viewed 3169 times ]
3) The code for reading in the generated data and rendering the new DLA structures is fully embedded in the
.Sci code (galaxy.cpp).
Note that I did NOT spend any time yet for tuning the sprite rendering and other rendering aspects like color! You see again plenty of
pink HII regions (possibly too many...)
Fridger