3D moon landings (LowRes NX)

SP4CEBAR 2023-12-27 23:27 (Edited)

I just had an amazing shower thought that makes 3D moon landings possible in NX!

Now we can finally experience the Apollo program on our home computers!

Here's how it works:

I've been using circle sprites to rotate rockets, and I plan to make 3D rockets the same way (just like vectorballs)

If the rockets themselves can freely rotate around all three axes, I can get away with a mostly fixed camera for the background, where the camera only moves vertically. The background will be a flat plane in which the horizon gets higher and higher the lower your distance gets to the lunar surface. To make it look better I could use raster effects to scale a texture, add 1-dimensional bumps like the bumps in the road of my raster racer but fixed, or vertical parallax like the lowresGalaxy background but vertical.

I can add an orbit view mode where, if I can draw 2D orbits (ellipses), I can also use a perspective matrix to draw 3D orbits and one sprite for the planet.

Depending on your view mode:
Bg 0 will probably show all the buttons, dials, and meters
Bg 1 will show the background: a surface or space
The sprites will show either spacecraft or orbits

Discussion

3D moon landings

I just had an amazing shower thought that makes 3D moon landings possible in NX!

Now we can finally experience the Apollo program on our home computers!

Here's how it works: