Fog of Light – Starting to Add Star-Fields May 28th, 2017
Patrick Stein

I have finally written my first OpenGL code using GLSL. Whew. That took way too long to get all working correctly. I promise, soon, I will upload some sample code so that others may not have to stumble as long as I did.

For the star-field, I generate a few thousand 2-D points. Each point has its own radius, its own opacity, and its own color.

I put these all into an OpenGL array buffer. Then, the vertex shader copies data out of my struct to set the color and the point size. Then, the fragment shader turns the color into two, overlapping radial gradients (one that is half the radius of the other) by modulating the color’s opacity.

screenshot of sample starfield

Next up will be nebulae, then planets/asteroids in the local system.

Fog of Light – Getting Underway May 15th, 2017
Patrick Stein

Dauntless (The Lost Fleet, Book 1) was the first science-fiction book I read that tried to deal with space combat with the real-world constraint that light only travels so fast. It takes light eight minutes to get from the Sun to Earth. It takes light more than a second to get from the Earth to the Moon. Depending on where they are in their orbits, it takes between three minutes and twenty-two minutes to get light from Mars to Earth.

Imagine that you’re a star-ship. You and your companions have just warped into a new star system. You see a flotilla of enemy ships about 45 light-minutes away. That means, you’ve got 45 minutes before that flotilla can possibly even know that you’re in their star system. How much can you get done in that time? Once they can see you, how much can you mislead them on your target if they’re going to be operating on data about where you were heading more than half an hour ago?

For years, I have been batting around this concept, hammering it into a game. I have finally gotten started on it.

Armed with some functions like these, I am constructing values which change at points in space-time and querying the value visible from other points in space-time.

(defgeneric get-nearest-value (space-time-value space-time-point)
  ...
  (:documentation "Find the observable value of a quantity
SPACE-TIME-VALUE when observed from a given location
SPACE-TIME-POINT. This method finds the most-recent
value V0 (at location P0) for this data when viewed from
the given location. This method returns (VALUES V0 P0).
This method makes no effort to interpolate the results."
))

Here are my first, visually-demonstrable results:

Hopefully, there will be plenty more coming in the near future.

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