Hey everyone, Well, here they are at last, the long awaited screen shots of my Lunar Flight Sim (Apollo model - probably forever to remain a work in progress). These images have been converted to jpgs from the original bitmaps and have suffered somewhat from the compression (especially the stars which have become very "blurred-out"). Depending on how your browser is set, a scroll bar should appear on the bottom of the view window to allow you to pan the full-image. Or if not, to minimize the distortion, be sure to click on the "Expand to Fullsize" icon that in this case, should appear in the lower right hand corner of each image, if you hover your mouse pointer over it momentarily. Then use the scroll bars that appear to view the whole image - this restores the sizing as your browsers may compress the image to fit the page - which basically ruins the image.
Image #1 is from high Earth orbit looking towards the moon (the small blob to the right). I actually had to write a separate program to pre-render the alpha-blended cloud image on top of the land/sea image in order to lighten the workload of the GPU.
Image #2 is a portion of the moon prior to orbital insertion, showing the level of detail available.
Image #3 is at orbital altitude (116km) with the Command Service module - I haven't added the antenna yet and I'm going to redo the RCS quads in 3D - but I like the way the command module turned out (I found a nice head-on image at NASA which I applied a conical mapping to).
Image #4 is basically on the surface directly below where the CSM was in the previous image.
Image #5 is a little further around on the surface in a mountainous area to show the 3D surface better.
Image #6 is from lunar orbit but just to show the quality of the star background image - this took about 2 weeks to write another program to directly build the spherically mapped image from the approx 2 million star HIPPARCOS database. So every star is accurate although the individual magnitudes are difficult to represent properly - however you should be able to make out the Orion constellation standing upright near the horizon of the moon.
Basically after looking at Celestia, Orbiter, Eagle Lander and a few others I found there were things I liked about all of them - but none of them were exactly what I was looking for and I figured I could learn a lot of new things in the process and more or less let it develop in whatever direction I was most interested in at the time. The object is to see if it would be possible to land and then rendezous in complete manual - no gyros/computer/nav or guidance and control. All you get is a clock, altimeter and remaining fuel guage. I was close to this at one point, but when I was working on orbiting with the CSM I realized that I needed a major re-write to overcome the single precision limitation fundamental to DirectX. Now, I'm almost back to where I was a couple of months ago - except now the precision problem is fixed (mostly).
Not ready for beta testing yet (p.s. - don't hold your breath!! ).
Cheers, David Barr (aka DMV)
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