Notes, collected threads, links and downloads
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NOTE:
The prereleases (Needle, Mythica and Island One) has now been discontinued,
as the project will be released shortly.
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(click for full-size screenshot)

I have been working on the Ran project on and off since 2003, with two
previous releases. The forthcoming Version 3 is by far the largest of these,
and is a total reworking of the entire project.

As the project has taken such a long time, screenshots and in-progress discussion
has accumulated all over shatters.net and Celestial Matters, so i have decided to
gather up links to the older material and collect everything here in this thread.

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Links
The old shatters.net preview thread
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The Needle Mark II
- A few screenshots (click to enlarge):



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Mythica v.1.0
- a virtual, 3-dimensional sculpture: Rassilons concept, executed by me.

Click for full-size screenshot:




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EDITED March 7. 2008.

- rthorvald

Stunning... I'm a big fan of you both... this is a must have for me!

Runar:

I've downloaded it and will load it soon. It looks awesome!!!

Thank you for all the work. You said there was a story about Mythica. Has anyone told it? What did you have in mind?

Frank

fsgregs wrote:

You said there was a story about Mythica. Has anyone told it? What did you have in mind?

You can get a glimpse of it by running the enclosed CELscript. It is a very condensed version
of what one can find in RAN III; i decided to include it here too after your comment re explanations
for the weird shapes of some objects.

- rthorvald

RAN video clip:
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To illustrate a few details from Ran, i have made a 28 seconds long quicktime movie
with some short clips from various locales. With mpeg-4 compression it weighs 3 MB,
so the quality is not too good, but the uncompressed file are too big to be suitable for
posting here.

Download the Ran III quicktime demo (3 mb)

... This is plain footage from Celestia: apart from splicing the different segments
together and compressing the result, no post-processing has taken place.

- rthorvald

Wow runar you made mythica even better from those screenshots... Im downloading it now and hope to see it in its brilliance tonight...

And I cant wait for Ran III...

btw Cheers for the ring around the donut world... That never did come out right when I did it in the old celestia...

I'm going to be getting a much more powerful computer very soon so I will be able to explore these systems at reasonable framerates.

From what I've seen of Mythica, it reminds me of the alien system in Greg Bear's novel Anvil of Stars, which contains numerous seemingly-impossible structures.

chaos syndrome wrote:

From what I've seen of Mythica, it reminds me of the alien system in Greg Bear's novel Anvil of Stars, which contains numerous seemingly-impossible structures.

It must be fifteen years since i read that book; maybe something stuck

Glad you like it, though. More soon...

As for the framerates, they won´t be too bad. I have put a lot of planning into how and when things are loaded so as not to clutter memory too fast, and textures will be optimized in several qualities.
- rthorvald

Ran III Preview: Island One
- yet another place in Ran III

The Island One - a Bernal Sphere.
It has a radius of 9 kilometers and the central sphere spins to provide centrifugal force for gravity.
Huge mirrors arranged around the sphere illuminates the inside with natural sunlight.
Here´s a wikipedia article on the subject.


Screenshots (click for full size):


A schematic:



- rthorvald

Download Island One
I have prepared a separate demo prerelease of the Island One for download.

For this demo, i have placed it in orbit around Earth (at L5).
It is an 11 MB zip, and it will work out-of-the-box if you unzip it in your Add-Ons directory.

This is a copy for personal use only. Its main purpose is to get some feedback on how it behaves prior to the Ran III full release, so comments are welcome in this thread.

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NOTE:
All the prereleases (Needle, Mythica and Island One) has now been discontinued,
as the project will be released shortly.
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- rthorvald

Runar,

While admiring the Island One, I discovered that the Addon includes more than 2MB in 24 image files in /textures/medres which are not used. Their names all start with a dot.
e.g. ._th_band.png

You might want to consider eliminating them.

Under Linux and presumably under MacOS, files with names starting with a dot are hidden, so you might have overlooked them. They're listed when you use the command
ls -la

Runar,

I noticed that you're defining the components of the model with duplicated EllipticalOrbit declarations. You might want to consider defining their orbits relative to the "placeholder" object instead. Then you only have to change one orbit declaration when placing the model at different locations.

e.g.

Code:

"" "Sol/Earth"    {     Class "spacecraft"    Emissive   true    Mesh "th_islandrotlight2.cmod"    Radius 9     OrbitFrame      { BodyFixed     { Center "Sol/Earth/Island One" } }     FixedPosition  [ 0 0 0 ]    Albedo 0.01    RotationPeriod   0.07    }

Selden wrote:

Runar, While admiring the Island One, I discovered that the Addon includes more than 2MB in 24 image files in /textures/medres which are not used. Their names all start with a dot. e.g. ._th_band.png

Very strange. When i do the same, it only lists one invisible file, the .DS_Store. There are only the 23 visible files there... Can the unzip utility be playing a trick on you?

- rthorvald

PS: thanks for the tip re positioning; i´ll see for the final release...

Runar, "._" files are resource forks on Mac OS X.
These are normally completely hidden on OS X, but are probably created by the zip utility for cross-platform compatibility.
I think if you use a resource fork deletion utility just prior to making the zip archive, you can eliminate the creation of superfluous "._" files.

Here's an explanation of "._" files on Apple's support site: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106510

dirkpitt wrote:

Runar, "._" files are resource forks on Mac OS X. These are normally completely hidden on OS X, but are probably created by the zip utility for cross-platform compatibility.

Thank you, dirkpitt. I know this. But i checked the zip archive via the terminal (i unzipped it), and there were no hidden files there apart from the .ds_store file...

- rthorvald