Hello, I'm Ferdinand Majerech aka kiith-sa, a student of Informatics at University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik, Košice, Slovakia.
I'm interested in the "Irregular Solar System bodies" idea (or anything else involving OpenGL or graphics in general). So far I had a brief look at Stellarium source and got it to build from the bzr repo. Yesterday I was at the Stellarium IRC channel to discuss the project and I was pointed to the mailing list. I still need some information before applying to make sure I know what the project will involve. As I said on the IRC, my first impression was that on the OpenGL side of things, most of the work is done (i.e. the rendering itself). treaves said that there's still a lot of OpenGL work to be done. Could someone clarify? (my impression is that once you load the model, all you need is to pass vertex/texcoord/normal array and transformation data to the StelPainter class - which already handles the drawing part - what other (GL) work is needed?) Side note: OpenGL code seems to be not well isolated (e.g. used directly in objects being drawn) and rather messy and inefficient (e.g. no VBOs - I understand the need for vertex arrays for e.g. some open source drivers that don't support VBOs - but it seems most vertex data in Stellarium is static once generated - and VBOs can bring huge speedup there - so I think they should at least be optional) . Could refactoring/isolating/optimizing GL code be another GSoC project? Back to the project idea: treaves said that NASA makes the models available in the .obj format. (link? don't know what to google for) I'd like to use this format directly, as it's trivial to load (very straightforward, text-based format) (Assuming we're talking about the Wavefront .obj, which is the most common one). That said, since .obj is text-based, it needs to be parsed, and if the vertex count is too large, that might be slow. I could design a simple binary format if that is the case, but I'd rather first implement the .obj format and see how fast it is. Another thing treaves mentioned is needed is orbital data for these bodies, which will be needed to position/rotate them, and this data is available but will need to be converted to JSON to be loaded by Stellarium. I'm not an astronomer - not even a hobbyist, and I don't have the needed knowledge in this area. Where can I find this data, and what do I need to learn? Is there any part of Stellarium source code I can look at to get a better idea? (I.e. I'll need to figure out how to take orbital data and get the position and rotation (and maybe more parameters?) of a body at a given moment). Also, are there any other significant things that need to be done as a part of this project that I didn't notice? Some information about me: I'm a beginning open source enthusiast, mostly interested in game development. Most of my projects are in Python, C++ and D. Recently, I started working on various small gamedev-oriented libraries for the D language. I'm interested in graphics programming and anything related, and also in (non-premature) optimization. Some previous (one man, open source) projects: MiniINI - a C++ INI parser and an experiment in optimization. This was my toy project in some time - take something as trivial as INI parsing and try to get it as fast as possible. Note that both the API and implementation are designed for maximum performance, so they're not a good example of readable C++ code. miniini.tuxfamily.org https://launchpad.net/miniini D:YAML - A YAML parser for D. What the title says, a YAML parser. This one is designed to be easy to use and to have a nice API, although it's in D, not in C++. dyaml.alwaysdata.net https://github.com/kiith-sa/D-YAML This turned out to be a wall of text. Sorry about that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ Stellarium-pubdevel mailing list Stellarium-pubdevel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stellarium-pubdevel
