3D Starchart - Teaser 1: Rendering Planets

So this is the first info about my “project”. Yes, I try to make a starchart for freelancer in 3D. The picture above is a screenshot of my program, wirtten in C#, using the Microsoft XNA Framework 4.0 for graphics.
It needs loads of improvemet, of course. I realise Pittsburgh and Maine in the background show serious flickering, the sun is not really displayed well and all other space objects are only displayed by their name. And the lighting is probably a bit extreme.

Most of the work I did thus far is beneath the surface: the means of accessing all the data required for rendering this picture. I might go into detail in a second teaser.

So how do planetary textures work? Actually, it’s quite easy, Freelancer uses a technique known as cubic mapping, where a cube of six textures is mapped onto a sphere. To figure this out, I created a test planet and replaced manhattan with it:

As XNA (and DirectX) natively support cube textures, the rest was quite easy.

I will publish the code soon, after I stuctured it a bit better, added all the licence info (I put so much work in it, I just don’t want to release it without any kind of licnese. it will be open source, of course.) and updated the copyright info (of course I used a lot of work by other people, and I certaily don’t want to “sell” it as my own, after all I’m not minister of defense).

=Alex= wrote:
Sounds good, what license are you intending to put on it?

The MPL (Mozilla Public License) as code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary code. An important part of my project is a dll to access Freelancer data and I want to allow people to use it in their project even if they’re not prepared to make their software open source.

So, finally, I managed to include models in Starchart. I know it’s nothing new and I admit that without access to the sources of the UTF editor I couldn’t have done it but I hope that this combination of system, planets and models is at least something.

And, as promised, it’s all open source.
Get the code here

I uploaded a built version to sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/flapi/files/

You will need the .NET Framework 4 and the XNA Redistributables 4

It can take quite some time to start and will use ca. 600mb ram at startup and much more if you switch between several systems until it will crash due to low memory. Well, it’s pre pre pre alpha

Controls:
press the right mouse button and move the mouse to look around
change position with arrow keys
left-klick on a system on the sector map to go there (does not work too well)
press h or j to show/hide jumphole/jumpgate connections on the sector map

Did you get an error message? if yes, what did it say?

Theoretically, text inis shouldn’t be a problem. On startup, Starchart looks for the freelancer registry entry, then parses freelancer.ini to get the data path and the name of universe.ini and solararch.ini, then parses these and all inis and utfs refrenced there. Of course I could have made some mistakes (better: I know I did, adoxa already pointed out) so any further info could halp me fix that.

Nice to know it works with vanilla on other machines, though. Could you post some data about your pc and how you experienced the performance of Starchart? Thanks for testing!

yep, I just installed JFLP after adoxa pointed out that “I don’t like it”
Starchart, or rather my FLApi library are very strongly typed. The invalid cast is because in JFLP many values that are floats in vanilla are integers, and the parser handles this correctly but the api assumes other types.

Will try to fix that soon

No problem at all. But I just “released” version 0002, should work with JFLP

I didn’t plan on such a quick release plan, so don’t get used to it

I will include more user choices in future releases

No not an editor really, more a system viewer, well, a star chart

But Starchart really is just a frontend for FLApi, a library im working on to access Freelancer data. The api could be eqipped with editing functions (I plan to, some time in the distant future), so then it can be used to build editors. Starchart itself could evolve into a new engine for Freelancer, but that is far far off. I’m just scratching at the surface.