5 ms·

Unemployed game designer creates mind-blowing solar system explorer app

181 points by dwynings 15y ago

rollypolly 15y ago
This guy is talented! He needs to get on kickstarter and finance his own project.
- Impossible 15y ago
  He already has an IndieGogo campaign here (http://www.indiegogo.com/Solar-system-educational-program http://www.indiegogo.com/Solar-system-educational-program). It has flexible funding so even if he doesn't hit his goal of $8K he'll see some money from it (at the time of this post he's at $1056 with 24 days left).
- hk_kh 15y ago
  Or.. you know, just sell it.
cek 15y ago
Fantastic! I'd buy this. Just spending 6 minutes watching the video made me understand the solar system better!
skywalk 15y ago
This app goes a bit further: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YzoXPav7uzs http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y... (and clearly had more funding) - more applicable to the scientist than the casual user playing around with an app on their ipad
- mturmon 15y ago
  It's very cool and no doubt fun to play with, probably an astronomer would enjoy just panning around. I'm still not sure what the actual scientific use case would be. Perhaps people planning flybys for Cassini? Or maybe for some Mars planning cases, although most planning is far more quantitative and fine-grained than what that would support.
- hollerith 15y ago
  if the goal is scientific understanding, he is going to have to improve the portrayal of the size of the sun relative to the size of the earth.
phodo 15y ago
Mojang/Notch should hire him to add his talents to the metaverse of 0x10c. Sounds like a great fit. If not, then maybe for a remake of Elite... :)
leeoniya 15y ago
instead of porting it to iOS and Android and not knowing how long it will take, port it to WebGL! though it may be harder to monetize :(
- wlesieutre 15y ago
  But it's written in UE3, which can make iOS and Android games. There might be significant changes to work around the platforms' limitations, but he won't have to do it from scratch. To make it in WebGL / Javascript, I imagine he'd have to rewrite everything.
samstave 15y ago
This is fucking AMAZING! The music reminds me of the original Homeworld game.
- huggyface 15y ago
  It is pretty neat, but am I the only one (rhetorical - I know I'm not) that finds that music grating? That's of the "spacey" variety that is basically cliche, and the first thing I do (see: a quick Eve online game) is disable music.
  - samstave 15y ago
    I have never played Eve Online - but I played Homeworld I and II and I loved the music... they are quite old - but maybe they pioneered that music style thus my nostalgia for it, while you might find it grating...
    - tsunamifury 15y ago
      Homeworld did not pioneer the 'Ambient' music genre.
      - hellerbarde 15y ago
        He probably meant ambient music for space. But even that is probably not true.
      - damncabbage 15y ago
        What about Microprose's Lightspeed [1]? ;) [1] http://youtu.be/_q-TgFdVQF4?t=25s http://youtu.be/_q-TgFdVQF4?t=25s
thangalin 15y ago
Here is a solar system flyby that I crafted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ It uses time to give the viewer a feel for the expansiveness between the planets.
- sage_joch 15y ago
  How could a video that awesome only have 680 views? Makes me wonder what else I'm missing. edit: Can you explain this line (from the beginning): "Whenever the date flips, it represents the point of least distance between the departure and destination planets."
  - thangalin 15y ago
    I'm glad you enjoyed it. Took several weeks to program and render. Getting the atmosphere for Venus and Mars to be so close to photo-realistic was tricky. I wasn't happy with the way I phrased that line. The dates represent the time at which two planets are at their periapsis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis). This significantly reduces the time to travel between two planets. For the gas giants, this happens once every 172 years (http://tinyurl.com/d6r3rnn http://tinyurl.com/d6r3rnn). This is first shown at 3:15 when the date flips from 2153-02-27 to 2154-06-16, which marks the closest date that Mars and Jupiter approach each other. Voyager spacecraft were launched to take advantage of this relatively short distance. The video is a small part of a longer video I had envisioned to excite kids about space exploration: https://github.com/thangalin/flyby/wiki/_pages https://github.com/thangalin/flyby/wiki/_pages
    - sage_joch 15y ago
      Got it; thanks. I wasn't aware (til I went back and watched it again) that the text of the date actually flipped. My first thought was, "isn't the date continually flipping?" Now I'm trying to think of alternative ways to phrase that. Maybe something like: "Before departing a planet, the ship will rest until the distance to the next planet is minimized. The date will jump forward to show the time elapsed."
iRobot 15y ago
Just donated $20, and I'll definitely buy it. Read a few sci-fi novels where they are describing exactly this kind of stuff on the bridge, this makes them all feel so much real.
leot 15y ago
Awesome One thing I really want to see get out of a universe/solar system app, though, is a better sense of scale -- to me, having enlarged planets makes it difficult for me to understand the strength and range of gravity, or the challenges of the distances involved. Perhaps this could be done by adding a window showed a magnified view of (the) space under the cursor, rather like a telescope/magnifying glass?
- christiangenco 15y ago
  Yes! I'm so glad I wasn't the first person so say this - a complete misunderstanding of the scale of the solar system is one of my greatest pet peeves. Imagine a perfect scale model of the universe where the sun is 4.3 feet in diameter (a foot longer than a meter stick). How big and how far away do you imagine earth to be? Nobody can intuitively come close to the right answer because there's absolutely no attempt at any level of general education for conveying the scale of things in this realm. The correct answer is precisely 0.476 inches, a little smaller than a dime, and 465 feet away, about two football fields. This simulation - while cool - at times depicts Jupiter as being twice as big as the sun, but at this scale it would be 5.332 inches in diameter (about the size of a cantaloupe). At the very least, I'd sleep much better if his "scale" toggle was off by default.
  - neilk 15y ago
    The app creator made the right decision when he defaulted to a false scale. Scale is not the only important thing to convey, one also wants to show relationships and have a model of the whole that fits in a monkey brain. Also, in this interface, the planets serve as big "buttons" to navigate to a celestial body of interest. So they have to be larger. The thing would be unusable, and boring, if it showed specks of dust orbiting a mustard seed.
  - nisse72 15y ago
    Here's another take on that, a scale model of the solar system that stretches across much of Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System The sun is 110 m in diameter ("including corona" they say). A 65 cm Earth is 7.6 km away.
rimantas 15y ago
If you are into this kind of stuff, check out "Star walk" and especially "Solar walk" for iOS. Probably having seen these apps makes me fail at seeing the mind-blowing part of the app in submission :(
miahi 15y ago
It looks better than Celestia[1], but it will need a lot of time to reach the same complexity and data[2]. [1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [2] http://celestiamotherlode.net/ http://celestiamotherlode.net/
- muyuu 15y ago
  It's a completely different idea. In the article they mention 2 other similar paid apps. Celestia is quite focused on accuracy and while it has many educational overlays and add-ons, it's a practical tool for astronomy geeks "in the know". It's used by the ESA to interface with their Space Trajectory Analysis tool. Celestia is free and OSS (GPL). Celestia receives no funding and all support AFAIK has been made in terms of sharing knowledge and source code. Celestia is, in short, an old school pure Open Source project. This has pros and cons, but I'd say it's pretty f*ing amazing.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    It's amazing, but I'd much rather fund Celestia than a closed-source semi-competitor that runs only on Windows.
hellweaver666 15y ago
What would really make an app like this awesome for the masses is the ability to alter things. Tweak the curves on orbits and see what would happen, alter the rotation of the planets, drop a new moon in, fire an asteroid at a planet, trigger a solar flare. I would pay money for an app that lets me live out my devious plans of destroying the solar system.
- Fizzer 15y ago
  You want Universe Sandbox: http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/
jheriko 15y ago
I hear there is an amazing augmented reality star gazing app called Star Chart for iOS, Android, Nokia and Windows Phone 7 which does something quite similar, although with a slightly different feature set... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.escapistgames.starchart&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.escapistga... http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8
JanusDB 15y ago
Nasa's PDS challenge: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852833 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852833

181 points by dwynings 15y ago

rollypolly 15y ago

This guy is talented! He needs to get on kickstarter and finance his own project.

Impossible 15y ago
He already has an IndieGogo campaign here (http://www.indiegogo.com/Solar-system-educational-program http://www.indiegogo.com/Solar-system-educational-program). It has flexible funding so even if he doesn't hit his goal of $8K he'll see some money from it (at the time of this post he's at $1056 with 24 days left).
hk_kh 15y ago
Or.. you know, just sell it.

cek 15y ago

Fantastic! I'd buy this. Just spending 6 minutes watching the video made me understand the solar system better!

skywalk 15y ago

This app goes a bit further: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YzoXPav7uzs http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y... (and clearly had more funding) - more applicable to the scientist than the casual user playing around with an app on their ipad

mturmon 15y ago
It's very cool and no doubt fun to play with, probably an astronomer would enjoy just panning around. I'm still not sure what the actual scientific use case would be. Perhaps people planning flybys for Cassini? Or maybe for some Mars planning cases, although most planning is far more quantitative and fine-grained than what that would support.
hollerith 15y ago
if the goal is scientific understanding, he is going to have to improve the portrayal of the size of the sun relative to the size of the earth.

phodo 15y ago

Mojang/Notch should hire him to add his talents to the metaverse of 0x10c. Sounds like a great fit. If not, then maybe for a remake of Elite... :)

leeoniya 15y ago

instead of porting it to iOS and Android and not knowing how long it will take, port it to WebGL! though it may be harder to monetize :(

wlesieutre 15y ago
But it's written in UE3, which can make iOS and Android games. There might be significant changes to work around the platforms' limitations, but he won't have to do it from scratch. To make it in WebGL / Javascript, I imagine he'd have to rewrite everything.

samstave 15y ago

This is fucking AMAZING! The music reminds me of the original Homeworld game.

huggyface 15y ago
It is pretty neat, but am I the only one (rhetorical - I know I'm not) that finds that music grating? That's of the "spacey" variety that is basically cliche, and the first thing I do (see: a quick Eve online game) is disable music.
- samstave 15y ago
  I have never played Eve Online - but I played Homeworld I and II and I loved the music... they are quite old - but maybe they pioneered that music style thus my nostalgia for it, while you might find it grating...
  - tsunamifury 15y ago
    Homeworld did not pioneer the 'Ambient' music genre.
    - hellerbarde 15y ago
      He probably meant ambient music for space. But even that is probably not true.
    - damncabbage 15y ago
      What about Microprose's Lightspeed [1]? ;) [1] http://youtu.be/_q-TgFdVQF4?t=25s http://youtu.be/_q-TgFdVQF4?t=25s

thangalin 15y ago

Here is a solar system flyby that I crafted: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ It uses time to give the viewer a feel for the expansiveness between the planets.

sage_joch 15y ago
How could a video that awesome only have 680 views? Makes me wonder what else I'm missing. edit: Can you explain this line (from the beginning): "Whenever the date flips, it represents the point of least distance between the departure and destination planets."
- thangalin 15y ago
  I'm glad you enjoyed it. Took several weeks to program and render. Getting the atmosphere for Venus and Mars to be so close to photo-realistic was tricky. I wasn't happy with the way I phrased that line. The dates represent the time at which two planets are at their periapsis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis). This significantly reduces the time to travel between two planets. For the gas giants, this happens once every 172 years (http://tinyurl.com/d6r3rnn http://tinyurl.com/d6r3rnn). This is first shown at 3:15 when the date flips from 2153-02-27 to 2154-06-16, which marks the closest date that Mars and Jupiter approach each other. Voyager spacecraft were launched to take advantage of this relatively short distance. The video is a small part of a longer video I had envisioned to excite kids about space exploration: https://github.com/thangalin/flyby/wiki/_pages https://github.com/thangalin/flyby/wiki/_pages
  - sage_joch 15y ago
    Got it; thanks. I wasn't aware (til I went back and watched it again) that the text of the date actually flipped. My first thought was, "isn't the date continually flipping?" Now I'm trying to think of alternative ways to phrase that. Maybe something like: "Before departing a planet, the ship will rest until the distance to the next planet is minimized. The date will jump forward to show the time elapsed."

iRobot 15y ago

Just donated $20, and I'll definitely buy it. Read a few sci-fi novels where they are describing exactly this kind of stuff on the bridge, this makes them all feel so much real.

leot 15y ago

Awesome One thing I really want to see get out of a universe/solar system app, though, is a better sense of scale -- to me, having enlarged planets makes it difficult for me to understand the strength and range of gravity, or the challenges of the distances involved. Perhaps this could be done by adding a window showed a magnified view of (the) space under the cursor, rather like a telescope/magnifying glass?

christiangenco 15y ago
Yes! I'm so glad I wasn't the first person so say this - a complete misunderstanding of the scale of the solar system is one of my greatest pet peeves. Imagine a perfect scale model of the universe where the sun is 4.3 feet in diameter (a foot longer than a meter stick). How big and how far away do you imagine earth to be? Nobody can intuitively come close to the right answer because there's absolutely no attempt at any level of general education for conveying the scale of things in this realm. The correct answer is precisely 0.476 inches, a little smaller than a dime, and 465 feet away, about two football fields. This simulation - while cool - at times depicts Jupiter as being twice as big as the sun, but at this scale it would be 5.332 inches in diameter (about the size of a cantaloupe). At the very least, I'd sleep much better if his "scale" toggle was off by default.
- neilk 15y ago
  The app creator made the right decision when he defaulted to a false scale. Scale is not the only important thing to convey, one also wants to show relationships and have a model of the whole that fits in a monkey brain. Also, in this interface, the planets serve as big "buttons" to navigate to a celestial body of interest. So they have to be larger. The thing would be unusable, and boring, if it showed specks of dust orbiting a mustard seed.
- nisse72 15y ago
  Here's another take on that, a scale model of the solar system that stretches across much of Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System The sun is 110 m in diameter ("including corona" they say). A 65 cm Earth is 7.6 km away.

rimantas 15y ago

If you are into this kind of stuff, check out "Star walk" and especially "Solar walk" for iOS. Probably having seen these apps makes me fail at seeing the mind-blowing part of the app in submission :(

miahi 15y ago

It looks better than Celestia[1], but it will need a lot of time to reach the same complexity and data[2]. [1] http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [2] http://celestiamotherlode.net/ http://celestiamotherlode.net/

muyuu 15y ago
It's a completely different idea. In the article they mention 2 other similar paid apps. Celestia is quite focused on accuracy and while it has many educational overlays and add-ons, it's a practical tool for astronomy geeks "in the know". It's used by the ESA to interface with their Space Trajectory Analysis tool. Celestia is free and OSS (GPL). Celestia receives no funding and all support AFAIK has been made in terms of sharing knowledge and source code. Celestia is, in short, an old school pure Open Source project. This has pros and cons, but I'd say it's pretty f*ing amazing.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It's amazing, but I'd much rather fund Celestia than a closed-source semi-competitor that runs only on Windows.

hellweaver666 15y ago

What would really make an app like this awesome for the masses is the ability to alter things. Tweak the curves on orbits and see what would happen, alter the rotation of the planets, drop a new moon in, fire an asteroid at a planet, trigger a solar flare. I would pay money for an app that lets me live out my devious plans of destroying the solar system.

Fizzer 15y ago
You want Universe Sandbox: http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/

jheriko 15y ago

I hear there is an amazing augmented reality star gazing app called Star Chart for iOS, Android, Nokia and Windows Phone 7 which does something quite similar, although with a slightly different feature set... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.escapistgames.starchart&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.escapistga... http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/star-chart/id345542655?mt=8

JanusDB 15y ago

Nasa's PDS challenge: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852833 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852833