Flight through/around Clouds

[Flight Poster] [Yet another Flight Poster]  

Hovering through clouds


  A simple virtual reality thing
  • flies in a window which is not only draggable and zoomable but also fully resizable
  • has a mouse control (which works in the full-screen mode too)
  • can fly through any user-dropped elevation map; the map can be painted in custom colors
  • sports an application icon, many thanks to Teddy Schatz (BiadeRunr@aol.com)
  • with the complete source and lots of comments and explanations
  • shows off a custom (private) event queue, and the flexibility it gives
  • No QuickDraw3D, all rendering and graphics is done by the code itself
If my PowerMac 8500/132 doesn't lie to me, the new Venus flies at 27 frames/sec in a 240x200-pixel window, and at 4 frames/sec in a 1024x768-pixel window (at 8-bit color depth).

Platforms
 Mac/PowerMac (CodeWarrior 7-12)
Version
 The current version is 3.5, May 2, 1997.
References
  The README file [plain text file]

Application and the source code archive off this site [.cpt.hqx, 475K]
contains a PowerMac application, CodeWarrior 11 project, and the source code.

Screen shot of the flight [.gif, 15K]
And another snapshot [.gif, 15K]
These are full-screen versions of the thumbnail pictures above - still snapshots taken off the Mac screen during the flight. The pictures correspond to an old Venus, version 1. I can't seem to make up my mind as to which frame of the new flight is the best.

Requires
Grayscale image processing classlib

Be Venus
A port of circling around in clouds to a BeBox, a way cool computer. I did it in a few hours during MacHack'96; recompiled for BeOS DR8 at the December 1996 BeDev kitchen (no code modifications turned out to be necessary).
The code takes the full advantage of a multiprocessor architecture of the BeBox: the application runs in 3 threads: one thread for a view from above window, another thread for a view from the cockpit window, and yet another thread for a plane. The plane flies, and sends messages to the two window threads to update their projections/views.
The archive includes the complete source code plus the application. The size of the executable is only 19K!
Note: the mere existence of this port proves that the modeler and the renderer are largely platform-independent. Thus you can use this archive as a POSIX port of the circling around in clouds application. The archive is in the regular .tar.gz format. It was submitted to BeWare.

 : Version 2 of Venus is a flight-around. Here's how it looks like: [Circling Poster]
(click on the thumbnail to get the full view). And another and yet another screen shot. On a PowerMac 8500/150, the thing flies at a speed of 32-37 frames/sec.


Last updated September 26, 1997

This site's top page is http://okmij.org/ftp/

oleg-at-okmij.org
Your comments, problem reports, questions are very welcome!