On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 06:32:17PM +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 17:41 +0000, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> > I've been hacking xearth recently to render the Polar regions white.
> > Unfortunately, the shape tables are not commented, so I have to go
> > through manually to determine what shapes correspond to what land
> > features.
>
> Now that's pretty cool. Will you be releasing it into the wider
> world? :)
Naturally. I'm really big on Open/Shared Source.
> I wonder if a modern version is overdue that does do some pretty good
> shading approximation of all the landmasses? And even better, some form
> of chaotic cloud approximation to give it that real 'earth from space'
> feel!
Hmm... I just did a trivial code tweak... the hardest thing I'm doing
is reviewing (and commenting!) hundreds of shape structures.
> The former's probably not *that* complex (just potentially a lot of
> effort to set the static data up). I have no idea if the latter's really
> possible for a desktop machine, even with some really basic
> approximation of clouds...
The other thing is number of colors... xearth runs fine on an 8-bit desktop.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 18-Oct-2004 21:10 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -61.6 F (-52.0 C) Windchill -95.40 F (-70.8 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 10.7 kts Grid 055 Barometer 676.4 mb (10764 ft)
Ethan.Dicks_at_amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
Received on Mon Oct 18 2004 - 16:21:07 BST