I would guess that one of the icons must have changed size slightly recently, that would be enough to mis-align everything, well providing it was placed before the others, so most likely to be an icon on the left... But Jamie's time acceleration icons which I use, are working perfectly.

Thanks for that s2odan, I will investigate. If I find the icon that is causing the problem, I will resize it 😉

Hi, here's some pics of a new feature to the erath-like colour scheme.. coastal regions with colour shading based on water depth:

[attachment=634:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-24 19-11-40-88.jpg]

Great ! you can make reefs! This makes the planets look even more realistic. Well done s2odan! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> Oh I fixed the icon problem. It turned out that Jamie's icon files also included the older design dashboard. If I didn't copy that over all the icons fell into their proper places on the new dashboard. <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_cool.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='8-)' /> I should have known this as I used to mod cockpits for Flight Simulator <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_rolleyes.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

Cheers 🙂 Well done on nailing down the problem with adding in Jamie's icons 🙂

Another pic showing that feature with a little bit of tweaking to the colours:

[attachment=637:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-03-24 20-56-15-81.jpg]

I think that all the fjords and fiddly bits add a lovely baroque feel to a continent, don't you? I have this strange feeling that you're going to get an award for Norway. 😉

This looks great! If you could get some kind of specular reflection on the water areas you'd be done! 😀

maybe done on the surface but to make it look right you need some cloud coverage...

Yes I agree, clouds would be nice, maybe the odd Cyclone/Hurricane too for good measure. And Red River, I love that avatar of yours, every time I see it, I swear I can hear Data pounding that display! <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_lol.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' /> . Ah, blue screens of death, got to love em <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_rolleyes.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />

That's exactly what I meant. I don't know if s2odan even wants to do the clouds, but I like the way they're done in Orbiter. There are two 2D spheres of cloud textures that rotate around Earth at slightly different speeds. With good textures this is simple but effective, and I get a better frame rate with Orbiter than I do with Pioneer. Perhaps on gas giants we could have many 2d cloud spheres. It could look very cool when you're scooping fuel. 😎

Awesome work! But clouds are definitely required! Come on... 😎

Do you remember the clouds on the original Frontier? They looked a bit crap, right enough, but I vividly recall the first time I saw Earth from space, and I saw spiralling cloud formations (cyclones, weather fronts)

You can't see it very well in this screenie, but it's the best I could find:

I really want to see more detailed clouds than this from space. Like this, from Celestia:

This was done using a transparent sphere with cloud textures, which is nice and clean.

Once in the atmosphere, you can maybe add some volumetric clouds:

(this is the link for the Blender script which creates these - I wonder if you can do this easily and with little overhead in realtime in the Pioneer engine?)

I reckon with a combination of the two, you could get some really realistic-looking cloud effects.

Haha

"Come now, or you will be late."

So that's what you really look like! 😆

Mars has got a new outfit on:

[attachment=670:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-04-17 09-47-01-09.jpg]

[attachment=671:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-04-17 09-42-03-96.jpg]

[attachment=672:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-04-17 09-11-10-87.jpg]

😉

Now that's a terraformed Mars! Lovely outfit, but in that last pic I can see Uranus. 😉

Great pictures! Thanks s2odan.

And Marcel--that last comment made my day.

tinge of green here and there on mars might work

The moon...

New gas giant colour stuff:

Great work! The Moon is spectacular. And I thought the gas giants looked good before...but wow!

Here's a replacement to the really slow terrain with canyons used for Europa:

Something I've been testing out, it is Starfield changes per system based on system seed, some constellation stars and scaling star intensity by distance to a body that would emit or reflect light so stars will be brighter far away from objects than they are in orbit of a planet:

I like that idea a lot!

Dude, that is totally un-physical 😉

Keep starfields the same brightness and let HDR do its job

Well I must admit that I forgot HDR did all this when I first thought up the idea 😉 It was only after I had finished it and started some testing that I turned on HDR and suddenly realised that this was pointless 🙂 Although maybe not entirely, as we could easily have this effect in the regular shaders by passing a value through, and not have it require HDR.

Oh well, I probably won't be able to see any of this anyway until I get a better computer. 🙂 I'm thinking of Birds of Prey, anyone remember that one? If you flew the X-15 you could get high enough for the sky to darken and the stars would come out. It looked pretty awesome for the time on my Amiga. It really gave an impression of the altitude.